iOS and iPadOS 13: The MacStories Review

In looking back at major iOS releases from the recent past, it’s easy to see how building and positioning these annual updates has become a careful balancing act for Apple.

In last year’s iOS 12, we saw the company focus on improving performance, providing users with tools to understand their device usage habits, and adapting Workflow to the modern era of Siri and proactive suggestions. The strategy was largely successful: iOS 12 was regarded as Apple’s most reliable iOS release of late – a reputation that has resulted in a 90% adoption rate a year later; and the Shortcuts app – the highlight of last year from a user feature perspective – is becoming a built-in (and thus more powerful) app in iOS 13.

For all that Apple accomplished in iOS 12, however, some areas of the experience inevitably had to be put on the back-burner. Besides improvements to Reminders and Files, iOS 12 lacked a long-awaited dark mode (which was rolled out on macOS instead) as well as more substantial tweaks to the ever-evolving iOS 7 design language; chief among iOS 12’s absentee list, of course, was iPad. Even though Apple had trained users to expect major additions to the tablet platform on a biennial schedule (see iOS 9 and iOS 11), the lack of meaningful iPad features in iOS 12 spurred a contentious discussion when it became apparent that new iPad Pro hardware was so far ahead of its software, it legitimized asking whether investing in that hardware was even worth it.

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The annual debate that surrounds which features make it into each major iOS release is symptomatic of a complicated truth: iOS isn’t just the operating system that runs on iPhones anymore, and these annual releases are more than a mere collection of updated apps. iOS is the platform for an ecosystem of devices – from our wrists and speakers to cars and TV sets – and its changes have repercussions that ripple far beyond an updated Reminders app or a new icon set.

iOS isn’t just the operating system that runs on iPhones anymore.

This, of course, has been the case for a few years at this point, but the nature of iOS as an all-encompassing platform has never been as evident as it is today in iOS 13. For the first time since I started reviewing Apple’s annual iOS updates, it feels like the company is now keenly aware that a new iOS version has to cover an array of themes that can’t be pushed back for scheduling reasons. A single area of attention isn’t enough anymore – not for the Apple of 2019 as an economic, political, and social force, and not for iOS, the engine powering devices that aren’t just screens for apps, but bona fide lifestyle computers.

As a result, there’s something for everyone in iOS 13 and all the recurring themes of Tim Cook’s Apple are touched upon this time around. iOS 13 improves Face ID recognition and promises improvements to app download sizes and performance. Apple is sending strong signals on its commitment to privacy as a feature with a new sign-in framework for apps and enhancements to location tracking controls and HomeKit cameras. iOS’ design language is getting its biggest update in years with dark mode, new tools for developers to express colors and embed glyphs in their user interfaces, updated context menus, and redesigns aimed at facilitating one-handed interactions. We have notable improvements to built-in apps, including the rebuilt Reminders and Health, an overhauled Files app, and hundreds of quality-of-life tweaks that, in big and small ways, make iOS more capable and efficient.

No stone is left unturned in iOS 13 – and that includes iPad too.

The iPad experience has always been largely consistent with the iPhone – particularly since Apple unified core iOS interactions around a screen without a Home button – but also distinct from it. iOS 13 makes this distinction official by splitting itself in a second branch called iPadOS, which uses iOS as the foundation but is specifically optimized and designed for iPad.

It was clear when the new iPad Pro launched in late 2018 that it told only one part of a bigger story about the role of the tablet in Apple’s modern ecosystem. With iPadOS, Apple is ready to tell that full story: while the iPad has always been an extension of iOS, sharing key similarities with the iPhone hardware and software, it’s been evolving – arguably, a bit too slowly – into a different breed of computer that is fundamentally distinct from a phone.

We’ve been able to observe this divergence starting in iOS 9 with Split View multitasking and Apple Pencil, and the transition continued with iOS 11 and its drag and drop-infused environment. It was only natural (and well-deserved) for the iPad to begin advancing in a parallel direction to iOS – informed and inspired by it, but also capable of growing on its own and tackling problems that an iPhone doesn’t have to solve.

From this standpoint, there are two sides to iOS 13: on one hand, an underlying tide that raises all platforms, featuring a distillation of themes Apple comes back to on an annual basis; on the other, a fork in the road, opening a new path for the iPad’s next decade. And against this backdrop, a single question looms large:

Can Apple balance both?

But wait, there’s more

eBooks, Wallpapers, Shortcuts, Podcasts, and More

By subscribing to Club MacStories, you’ll gain exclusive access to a selection of extra perks related to this review:

eBook version. Available today, the eBook version is the best way to read this review offline using any EPUB reader. The book is fully interactive with all of the images, videos, and links to shortcuts that you’ll find on MacStories, and it looks great in Apple’s Books app. The eBook version can be downloaded in the members-only Downloads area here.

Exclusive wallpapers. For the very first time, we’re also offering Club MacStories members a set of free mobile (iPhone and iPad) and desktop (5K) wallpapers. They come in red, gold, and black, plus two colorful gradient versions. They’re absolutely stunning, and they’re also available for download right now.

MacStories Shortcuts Icons. Throughout the review, you’ll notice that shortcuts added to my Home screen feature custom icons not available by default in the Shortcuts app. Those glyphs are based on MacStories Shortcuts Icons. As a Club MacStories member, you’ll be able to buy MacStories Shortcuts Icons at 33% off. For more details on your discount and how to buy the icons, visit the MacStories Shortcuts Icons FAQ page.

Advanced shortcuts. Exclusively for Club members, I’ve created a series of advanced shortcuts that take advantage of the new Shortcuts features for iOS 13. The shortcuts will be released in a special issue of our newsletter, MacStories Weekly, later this week.

An exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the making of the review. Later this week in MacStories Weekly, Club members will get access to an exclusive Making Of about the review. In the article, I will describe my process for putting together this story, from mind-mapping to my writing workflow, scripts, and more. Additionally, Brian King, the animator who brought the review to life, will detail how 3D assets for the review were created.

Two special episodes of our podcast, MacStories Unplugged. We’ll also be releasing two special episodes of our members-only podcast. First up, this Saturday is a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the review, featuring my workflow, plus an interview with Brian King. Then, the following week, John and I will spotlight some of our favorite apps that take advantage of the new features of iOS 13.

A second eBook with additional iOS 13 coverage. The second eBook features a compilation of the nine iOS 13 previews that the MacStories team published this summer, updated to account for changes made to iOS 13 since publication. The second eBook is also available today.

You can unlock all of these perks with a Club MacStories subscription, starting at $5/month. And in doing so, you’ll also get access to the complete archive of Club MacStories with over four years worth of exclusive content.

We also recorded a special episode of our main podcast AppStories all about the review. In the episode, John and I provide a (spoiler-free) overview of the major themes of the review, plus some interesting iOS 13 tips & tricks.

You can listen to the episode below.

https://www.macstories.net/podcasts/appstories/episodes/130/embed/

Performance and Setup

As I’ve noted on MacStories and shared on my podcasts over the past year, it is my understanding that one of Apple’s priorities in iOS 12 was to provide devices that had made the cut in iOS 11’s 64-bit transition with one last reliable software update. The company didn’t publicly admit this; perhaps in hindsight the multiple mentions of features that had been tested on an iPhone 6 Plus should have been a telling sign. For those devices, iOS 12 was the end of the line.

A Note on This Review

This review was written while testing every beta of iOS and iPadOS 13 on a variety of devices, including a 5th generation iPad, two iPhone XS Max units, and two iPad Pros. Most of the story was written and edited while using iOS and iPadOS 13.0 between July and August; other parts were written while testing beta versions of iOS and iPadOS 13.1. The entire review was edited between late August and mid-September.

Screenshots throughout the story were captured on an iPhone XS Max and 2018 iPad Pro 12.9” running iOS and iPadOS 13.1, respectively. In most cases, from a design standpoint, there are no meaningful differences between iOS 13.0 and iOS 13.1; where appropriate, I’ve detailed which features or fixes will be coming in iOS 13.1.

As announced by Apple, iPadOS and iOS 13.1 will be released to the public on September 24th, 2019.

iOS 13 formalizes what Apple somewhat implied last year by dropping support for devices released between 2013 and 2014. This means the original iPad Air, iPad mini 2 and 3, and 6th generation iPod touch are out; on the iPhone side, 2013’s iPhone 5s will not receive iOS 13, nor will the problematic (for developers, given its memory constraints) iPhone 6 Plus, or iPhone 6. Thus, the lineup of pre-2019 iPhones, iPods, and iPads that can be updated to iOS 13 is the following:

iPhone | iPad | iPod touch
iPhone XS | iPad Pro 12.9" | iPod touch (7th generation)
iPhone XS Max | iPad Pro 11" |
iPhone XR | iPad Pro 10.5" |
iPhone X | iPad Pro 9.7" |
iPhone 8 | iPad (6th generation) |
iPhone 8 Plus | iPad (5th generation) |
iPhone 7 | iPad mini (5th generation) |
iPhone 7 Plus | iPad mini 4 |
iPhone 6S | iPad Air (3rd generation) |
iPhone 6S Plus | iPad Air 2 |
iPhone SE | |

There’s little about iOS 13’s higher requirements that merits comment: by now, we’re used to seeing Apple raise the threshold every couple of years; iOS 13 follows the company’s trend of supporting iPhones and iPads with at least four years of free software updates. Owners of the discontinued iPad Air 2, which launched in October 2014 featuring an A8X SoC, will be able to update their device to iOS 13; the iPad mini 4, which came out in September 2015 carrying the less powerful Apple A8 chip, will also be eligible for iOS 13.

As always though, older devices may not be compatible with certain system features designed for more capable modern hardware. In this case, neither the iPad Air 2 nor iPad mini 4 will gain access to Animoji and Memoji stickers, new keyboard functionalities of iOS 13 that require an Apple A9 SoC and above. Additionally, ARKit 3’s people occlusion, motion capture, and multiple face tracking features are exclusive to the following devices:

iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro

iPhone XR

iPhone XS and XS Max

iPad Pro (2018)

iPad Air (2018)

iPad mini 5

In terms of performance, iOS 13’s highlights are improvements to app delivery, app launch speed, and Face ID unlock. Alas, at least for now, overall performance in daily usage is somewhat worse than last year’s launch version of iOS 12.

Let’s start with the promises that can’t be immediately measured, and which we’ll have to trust Apple to deliver in the near future. According to the company, starting this fall apps from the App Store will be packaged with a new technique that should result in up to 50% smaller downloads. Similarly, Apple says that app updates should be up to 60% smaller on average. It’s unclear at this point whether Apple has further optimized their existing app thinning technologies, used a new compression engine for App Store binaries, or relied on something else entirely. It’s possible that these numbers may simply be a calculation derived from not having to embed Swift standard libraries into apps anymore thanks to ABI stability. I was unable to evaluate these app savings during the iOS 13 beta season as developers couldn’t push apps built with the iOS 13 SDK to the App Store yet. However, if Apple’s promises hold up, we should soon see a considerable reduction in the size of app downloads, which will help users with capped data plans as well as owners of devices with limited local storage. I assume the repercussions of these optimizations will be most evident on older devices without hundreds of GBs worth of free local storage.

According to Apple, a secondary effect of smaller app packages will be the increased speed of app launching. Because the system will be tasked with loading fewer resources upfront when launching an app for the first time, Apple claims that launching apps in iOS and iPadOS 13 will be up to 50% faster than before. Again, factual evidence on these improvements has yet to be gathered. I have some anecdotal evidence based on cold-launching built-in Apple apps on my iPhone XS Max test units running iOS 12 and iOS 13: apps on the latest OS appeared to be ready more quickly than their iOS 12 counterparts, but I’d rather wait for third-party developers to release their iOS 13 apps before calling Apple’s initiative a success.1

As for Face ID: the company hasn’t divulged any specifics on this, but their claim that Face ID unlocking should be up to 30% faster on all devices that support it (including the iPhone X and XR) thanks to iOS 13 has been backed up by my tests.

I’ve been using an iPhone XS Max running iOS 12 and another XS Max with the iOS 13 beta for the entire summer. Early on in the beta phase, it was clear that Face ID had been considerably improved in iOS 13, resulting in a faster unlocking process on the Lock screen. Even the animation of the padlock icon on the Lock screen is faster in iOS 13. You may think that a 30% speed increase is not a huge bump; in practice, the difference can be felt. By virtue of being faster, Face ID also feels more reliable than before, and therefore more naturally integrated with the hardware.

In the couple of years I’ve used Face ID on my iPhone X and XS Max, I’ve occasionally found myself longing for the days of Touch ID and its near-instant unlock on the Lock screen. I like Face ID, but I’ve always been aware of how I was trading some of Touch ID’s speed for Face ID’s futuristic, hands-free approach. I wouldn’t say that Face ID in iOS 13 is as fast as the golden days of the second-generation Touch ID sensor, but it’s very close now, and I haven’t thought about Touch ID once while using iOS 13 this summer.

Even more impressive is how Apple was able to improve Face ID exclusively via a software update, which makes you wonder how much faster it might still become with a new sensor in updated hardware. We’re closer than ever to the ideal of permanent ambient unlocking with no latency, and Apple’s getting there by optimizing the software that powers Face ID.

Back at WWDC, Apple mentioned its plan to bring a variety of other performance improvements to iOS 13, including: a more efficient shared cache system as well as cached system state; optimized background processes and a new BackgroundTasks framework for developers to tap into; reduced memory usage on Super Retina Displays (Apple’s parlance for the OLED displays in the iPhone X, XS, and 11 Pro); optimizations to FairPlay decryption (for DRM’d content).

Slide from WWDC 2019.

Unfortunately, in practice, it’s hard to tell whether any of these improvements made it into the first version of iOS 13, or what their impact on performance should have been. In my experience, following a notoriously rocky beta season, other aspects of the iOS 13.0 experience have fallen short of matching iOS 12’s stability and overall performance.

The first version of iOS 13.0 launching to the public today isn’t as polished or stable as the first version of iOS 12. In my tests, alongside the occasional SpringBoard crash, I experienced different types of glitches or slowdowns – from the Files app taking too long to display documents in a folder to the copy and paste menu failing to show me all options for selected text or Notes’ sync process hanging until the app was force-quit. It doesn’t help that features Apple initially promised as part of iOS 13, and which were available during the beta, were pulled from this first version and postponed until iOS 13.1. I get the sense that some of iOS 13’s instability may have been caused by the removal of functionalities that were supposed to be here today, but I may be wrong.

The first version of iOS 13 is by no means a “disaster”, as some have suggested on Twitter and other tech publications recently. But it’s not as tight or optimized as iOS 12 was at launch either. And maybe that’s the problem: performance and stability were a top priority for iOS 12 last year, and Apple treated them like actual features that deserved their full, undivided attention. iOS 12 spoiled us, but it seems that the same process can’t be repeated two years in a row. Hopefully, Apple will be able to rectify iOS 13’s stability shortcomings with iOS 13.1 and subsequent updates.

In terms of setup process, iOS 13 is another iteration on the slimmed down on-boarding flow that Apple revamped in iOS 11.

Obligatory screens explaining new system features such as dark mode (which can be enabled during setup) are the only change in iOS 13: extended data migration tools were introduced in iOS 12.4; there’s nothing else iOS 13 offers besides minor tweaks to descriptions and a page to test and preview dark mode. At some point, it would be nice to have more granular controls over which apps to restore from a backup, and in which order, during the setup process. Maybe next year.

Design

A theme that’s been raised in recent years for each version of iOS is Apple’s thinly veiled intention to dial back some of the design decisions made in the iOS 7 era. From the progressive embrace of larger, bolder typography to the quiet return of sparingly used drop shadows, rounder UI elements, and more obvious buttons, we’ve spent years wondering why Apple hasn’t caved to the pent-up demand for another system redesign, choosing to keep iOS’ design in a constant state of flux instead. And perhaps the answer is that we’ve been looking at this from the wrong angle all along.

There’s a responsibility that comes when the platform you’re maintaining and developing is used by over a billion people: redesigns are inherently costly, and that cost doesn’t only get absorbed by designers and developers who have to rewrite software for a new design language – it falls primarily on the users. With iOS 7, users had to spend several months – if not years – re-learning interfaces and interactions they had been mastering since the original iPhone. iOS 7 was a disruptive change for the design community (which is a separate discussion I can’t get into in this review), but even more so for the general iPhone and iPad user base. At the time, Apple felt that the cost was worth the risk as a new design language could provide them with a platform to scale their ecosystem; arguably, they were proven right with the launch of watchOS, new iPad screen sizes, tvOS, shared design and development resources, and a roster of services.

Today, I believe Apple feels a responsibility to foster their ecosystem without disrupting it again. If that’s the case, the cost of a sweeping redesign may be too high to justify: user patience, goodwill, and loyalty – key components of a service-oriented business – are too precious a resource to jeopardize every few years. Plus, what if most users – those who make up the “billion pockets” – don’t actually like having to learn a radical new design every few years?

I believe Apple feels a responsibility to foster their ecosystem without disrupting it again.

I may be wrong, but in considering how judiciously Apple has iterated iOS design in recent years, I think their trajectory fits this different mindset. iOS 7 was, in many ways, a bitter medicine that set Apple up for the next several years, but it overshot some design principles in the name of aesthetic purity. As a result, Apple has used the last five major releases of iOS to refine what worked in iOS 7 and rethink what didn’t. iOS 13 follows the same playbook: the string of refinements continues throughout the OS with changes aimed at taking advantage of OLED displays, making UI elements more intuitive or ergonomic, and extending the functionality of menus and share sheets. But it doesn’t fundamentally disrupt the experience.

Dark Mode

We all saw it coming: following last year’s debut in macOS Mojave, iOS 13 offers a system-wide dark mode that favors blacks and dark grays in lieu of iOS’ classic high-contrast black-on-white interface. The result is somewhat predictable, but it’s not uninspired, and a lot of consideration went into designing dark mode for different displays and multitasking conditions.

Dark mode in Music and Reminders for iPadOS 13.

Let’s start with the basics. Dark mode is exactly what you’d expect from this option: it can be enabled manually or on a schedule; like on macOS, apps automatically react to the system’s appearance change and dynamically switch their UIs from light to dark; third-party developers can query the system’s appearance status and let their apps’ UIs invoke light or dark modes accordingly. Dark mode is supported by default in all of Apple’s apps; obviously, the advantage of dark mode being a native OS feature is that all kinds of system UIs – from context menus to popups and notifications – can follow the setting too.

There are four ways to enable dark mode manually. The fastest (and most logical) is a new Control Center button that toggles between light and dark mode with a single press. I’ve installed this shortcut in Control Center on both my iPhone and iPad, and it’s quickly become one of my most used controls. I particularly appreciate how you can see apps’ interfaces alter their appearance in the background behind Control Center’s blur with a subtle transition.

Enabling dark mode from Control Center.

You can also toggle dark mode on and off from Control Center by pressing on the Brightness tile to expand it, and toggling between ‘Dark Mode Off’ and ‘Dark Mode On’ in the bottom left corner.

Enabling dark mode from Control Center’s Brightness tile.

Similarly, you can manually toggle dark mode in Settings ⇾ Display & Brightness:

And last, you can enable dark or light mode using the new ‘Set Appearance’ action of the (now built-in) Shortcuts app. As I’ll describe later, Shortcuts doesn’t offer actions to toggle between different appearance statuses (you can either enable light or dark mode), but this action makes it possible to enable dark mode from a widget or, thanks to automations, on a schedule, or when you arrive at a specific location.

You can activate dark mode from Shortcuts in iOS 13.

Speaking of schedules, it makes sense to see dark mode as a preference located under Settings ⇾ Display & Brightness, but I was somewhat surprised by how Apple designed its automatic activation. By flipping the ‘Automatic’ switch in Settings, iOS 13 reveals an additional ‘Options’ page where dark mode can be configured to activate on two different types of schedule: from sunset to sunrise (which uses your location to determine sunset times) or with a custom schedule. The latter option lets you pick which times you’d like the device appearance to transition from light to dark, and vice versa.

What’s missing from dark mode’s automatic activation is what Apple’s Books app has offered for a few years now: activation via ambient light. If you, like me, prefer to keep light mode always enabled, even after sunset, but switch to dark mode in apps only when you’re using an iPhone or iPad in bed without disturbing your significant other, you’ll be out of luck with dark mode in iOS 13. The absence of Books’ ‘Auto-Night Theme’ option for system-wide dark mode is surprising; I suppose it would make for a welcome addition in a future point release of iOS 13.

Dark Mode and Colors

For the past couple of years, iOS has provided users with a ‘Smart Invert Colors’ accessibility preference that would try to invert the color of the interface while leaving elements such as images untouched.

iOS 13’s dark mode is not a simple inversion of colors. Instead, Apple has re-engineered UIKit around the idea of semantic and dynamic colors that give apps a visual hierarchy; when apps take advantage of these new APIs and color definitions, the system automatically takes care of picking the best colors (for highlights, accent colors, and other UI elements) to maximize contrast with dark mode while respecting the multiple layers of interface that may be shown onscreen at once.

At a high level, Apple is advising developers to start describing the “purpose” of their colors rather than their hardcoded values. This is possible because iOS 13 comes with built-in definitions for the system “blue” or “red” colors, which don’t have a single value anymore but instead change subtly between light and dark appearances.

For instance, consider the following Mail screenshots:

In the light version, the color blue – used for the unread indicator and toolbar glyphs – has a value of RGB(0, 122, 255); in dark mode, the color blue has a slightly lighter shade with a value of RGB(10, 132, 255). Here’s where the two shades of blue sit on the color spectrum:

A subtle difference between two shades of blue.

This happens because, as I mentioned above, dark mode isn’t a simple inversion, nor is it inverting the background color but leaving other colors unaffected. To achieve a more pleasing visual effect and enhanced contrast, Apple is using the semantic color “blue”, which is natively understood by iOS 13, and which comes with alternate appearances for light and dark mode. This is also confirmed by Adaptivity, a handy utility by developer Geoff Hackworth which can expose the underlying color values of the systemBlue semantic color employed by iOS 13:

System blue in iOS 13.

The same is true for systemPurple…

System purple.

…systemTeal…

System teal.

…and other colors, including the multiple shades of gray supported by the system, each with its alternate appearance for light and dark mode:

12 shades of gray may not be as evocative as 50, but it’s still quite remarkable.

Dark Mode and Safari

As expected following its implementation in macOS Mojave, the WebKit engine powering Safari and Safari View Controller in iOS matches the system’s appearance setting. When you enable dark mode on an iPhone or iPad, websites that have opted into the proper WebKit APIs will automatically switch their CSS to dark mode.

MacStories supports automatic dark mode in Safari.

You can test this functionality with this very website: for the past few months, MacStories.net has offered an ‘Automatic’ theme option that follows whatever’s been set by the system you’re using to browse. This option was designed for macOS Mojave, but it works automatically with iOS 13 as well because Apple is relying on the same WebKit APIs. Hopefully, the launch of a native dark mode in iOS will result in more websites rolling out dark appearances that match a device’s preferences.

Once you realize how the semantic color system Apple has built works behind the scenes, you’ll start appreciating the many examples of it scattered across iOS 13, from the default background colors of views to separators between cells, scroll bars, menus, and other UI elements.

Here’s another example from Mail, featuring swipe actions that subtly change their colors between light and dark mode:

Swipe actions in Mail use the new system colors in iOS 13.

In iOS 13, Apple has built a whole “dictionary” of semantic colors that developers can use in their apps, which should remove much of the overhead involved with picking colors that look good, are legible, have enough contrast in dark mode, and work well in different accessibility conditions. Apple’s semantic colors do all of this “for free”.

A selection of iOS 13’s default system colors.

Developers can, of course, create their own semantic colors as well, and they can also supply a separate set of image assets for dark mode support. Apple, for instance, has designed new system wallpapers that come with alternate versions for iOS 13’s two appearances.

System wallpapers that support alternate versions for dark mode are indicated by an icon in Settings.

When picking a wallpaper in Settings, you’ll also find a toggle to automatically dim it when dark mode is enabled based on ambient light.

There’s an additional layer of sophistication involving dark mode’s color palette and its idea of interface hierarchies. Colors can have multiple levels: text labels, for example, have four levels of color in iOS 13, and each can be used depending on the hierarchical state of an interface displayed onscreen.

Apple is drawing from lessons learned from macOS Mojave: dark mode doesn’t exclusively rely on drop shadows to visually communicate layers of the UI; instead, it leverages “elevated” colors that stand out against a dark background and combines them with vibrancy (also improved in iOS 13) to keep text legible and provide better separation between apps.

This is particularly evident on iPad with Split View or when an app spawns multiple layers of UI, such as when a modal sheet or composer panel comes up. Here’s a good example of the concept of hierarchies and color levels in practice: when used in full-screen on iPad, the Mail app uses pure black as the background color for certain areas of its UI, which helps build the illusion that a single app is bleeding into the edges of the display.

Mail in full-screen.

However, when a second app is added in Split View, pure black becomes dark gray: Mail no longer considers itself the primary and only app in this multitasking space, switching its color palette accordingly.

Mail and Reminders in Split View.

This implementation of UI layers in iOS’ z-index and how they translate to colors doesn’t only apply to Split View, though. Mail for iPhone uses a pure black background for its large title bar in the initial Mailboxes screen. The black color seemingly blends into the bezels of the device on Super Retina Displays; when the user scrolls down into the list of mailboxes and content moves up, the large title recedes into the bar and vibrancy, along with one of the new materials in iOS 13, is used to separate the title bar and underlying table view.

Scrolling in Mail with dark mode enabled.

Going back to the pure black title bar: when you tap the composer button in the bottom right corner, iOS 13 uses the new modal sheet presentation style (more on this in the next section) to load the composer UI as a card on top of Mail’s root screen. And in doing so, the pure black background automatically switches to a secondary dark gray color that creates a “stacked” appearance at the top of the screen, which hints at the presence of another screen underneath the current modal view.

Secondary colors are used for a sheet’s modal presentation in iOS 13.

The same behavior carries over to Calendar in dark mode:

Notice how both the dark gray and red colors of the ‘2019’ view change when a new card comes up.

It also works in Music when the Now Playing screen pops up:

I’m simplifying here, and there are several other examples of semantic, hierarchical colors in iOS 13, but this should give you an idea of how, in designing dark mode, Apple didn’t merely “flip a switch” to turn everything black.

Even more than on macOS, a lot of thought was put into building a dark appearance for portable devices that are used by a diverse audience with a spectrum of preferences, professional needs, and degrees of visual impairments. The result is a refined, tasteful system that shows a profound understanding of the role of color in user interfaces (not a surprise given Apple’s pedigree in this field) and which demonstrates how iOS 7’s design language, for all its initial faults, is now enabling this kind of interface customization. Had Apple not rethought iOS’ design language around clarity and a content-first approach, I don’t think we’d be able to enjoy dark mode in its thoughtful implementation today.

All of this, however, begs the question: how much work will it be for developers to properly support dark mode in their apps? The answer is complicated.

In the short term, because developers can ask the system whether dark mode is enabled or not, I expect a lot of apps to retrofit their existing dark themes and make them compatible with dark mode, even though they may not adhere to all the guidelines proposed by Apple in terms of color and hierarchy.

Depending on the level of complexity in a third-party app that has long offered its own custom dark mode, it might make more sense for developers – especially indies – to not invest time and resources into rewriting their dark themes to mimic Apple’s behavior down to individual colors. And honestly, that approach will likely be good enough – I don’t think most users will notice the subtle discrepancies between Apple’s and third-parties’ dark appearances.

From left to right: Scriptable, LookUp, CARROT Weather, and PCalc running on iOS 13 with support for native dark mode.

Looking ahead at new apps (which may be designed with SwiftUI, which supports all of this by default), it’s a different discussion altogether. For the majority of new apps built for iOS 13, it wouldn’t make much financial sense to spend time replicating work Apple has already done for semantic colors, color hierarchies, and other conditions that iOS 13 covers natively in UIKit and SwiftUI. For this reason, I expect new apps – again, especially from small teams and indies – to be consistent with the dark appearances we’re seeing in Apple’s apps for iOS 13. Coming up with a similar framework from scratch is a lot of work when Apple has already solved the same problems with their semantic color system.

I don’t fear a world where all apps come with dark modes that look similar to each other: there are plenty of ways for developers to brand their apps and make them visually differentiated besides dark mode. In fact, if implemented well, a homogenous dark mode environment will only benefit users, who will get a consistent behavior across apps for iPhone and iPad, for different screen sizes and flexible multitasking contexts.

NapBot, a new CoreML-powered sleep tracker for iOS 13, was written in SwiftUI and supports dark mode out of the box.

Ultimately, using dark mode is a matter of personal preference. Personally, I still like to use iOS and iPadOS in light mode most of the time, enabling dark mode only when necessary at night if I don’t want to wake my girlfriend or prefer a more relaxing and subdued color palette in front of my eyes. There are some valid accessibility-related arguments on the downsides of dark mode; based on my personal experience, I find dark themes in Apple’s apps vastly superior to anything I’ve tried in third-party apps over the years, but I still find dark mode hard to read and more straining on my eyes over long periods of time due to its inherent lower contrast between text and other UI elements.

Even though I may not be using dark mode much on my devices, I recognize that it was a long-awaited feature, and I’m glad it shipped in iOS 13. I also have to admit that, from an aesthetic perspective (and despite a few downsides), its true black color looks gorgeous on OLED displays, particularly for apps such as Music and Photos, where colorful content pops out of dark backgrounds and shines front and center. From a technical standpoint, the system crafted by Apple’s design team is remarkably well thought-out; I’m curious to see what the impact on third-party apps will be.

Cards

iOS 13 expands the idea of modality in user interfaces by repurposing a design element that Apple first shipped in its media apps: cards. In iOS 13, the “sheet” presentation style now uses a card appearance that only partially covers an underlying view, creating a “stacked” appearance that dims the background and suggests additional layers of navigation are available beneath the current screen. The new style is used in a variety of system apps and it’s the new default setting for third-party apps as well.

We’ve seen this presentation style in Music, Podcasts, and Mail before as a custom enhancement to those apps; as a system feature in iOS 13, the behavior of the card appearance has been made consistent across apps and more clearly defined by Apple.

Cards can be dismissed in three ways: the user can tap a button (such as ‘Done’ or ‘Close’) to dismiss the view; the card can be grabbed from its top edge and pulled to the bottom of the screen to close it; if the content displayed within the card is scrolled to the top, swiping down anywhere inside the card will dismiss it.

Interacting with a card on an iPhone XS Max.

As you can see from the video above, these gesture-based dismissal methods facilitate one-handed interactions with cards on iPhone, which I assume was one of the primary motivations behind the feature. As phones get bigger, not having to reach a button at the top of the UI to close a view is a welcome ergonomic improvement.

Visually speaking, cards do a better job than full-screen modals at providing context around navigation and nested views. Of course, Apple still thinks there’s a place for full-screen modal views in iOS – especially for tasks which maximize content or require the full attention of the user, such as Markup view mode when editing screenshots – but you’ll find that cards have been implemented profusely in iOS 13.

The only criticism that can be ascribed to cards regards customization. The new modal presentation style always has a maximum height that covers almost the entire screen: developers can’t set a custom height value to bring up a “half card” in the middle of their UIs, sort of like Apple does with the bottom panels in Maps and Shortcuts. For this reason, I don’t expect custom implementations of cards to disappear overnight; given the popularity of cards as a modern design trend and their ergonomic convenience, I hope to see Apple expand the developer toolkit for this API to allow for additional presentation styles in the future.

These implementations of cards still aren’t part of the iOS SDK.

Cards are another way Apple is bringing more consistency to iOS’ design language by unifying interactions with modal sheets across apps. More developer customization options wouldn’t hurt, but cards are nevertheless a solid addition to the system: they look good, make navigation more contextual, and help in using large iPhones with one hand.

Context Menus

It’s best to think of context menus, another new UI element in iOS and iPadOS 13, not as a macOS-inspired change, but as Apple’s combination of peek and pop and actions embedded in the copy and paste menu. The word “context” sparks obvious memories of right-clicks and pointing devices, but iOS 13’s context menus couldn’t be farther from a desktop-like functionality. Context menus are, quite possibly, the end of 3D Touch, as well as a new way for apps to present action sheets.

At a high level, a context menu in iOS 13 is presented when you long-press an item that supports additional actions or that offers a preview. Actions can include the classic cut, copy, and delete buttons that were previously shown in the copy and paste popup menu or elsewhere in an app’s UI; previews, like peek and pop, support all kinds of content, from webpages and photos to Mail messages and iMessage threads.

There are some key differences between iOS’ old peek and pop preview system, the copy and paste menu, and iOS 13’s new context menus. First of all, context menus show more actions at once in a list: each action has an associated glyph on the right side; it’s easier to discover actions by scrolling a context menu than it was to tap buttons in a copy and paste popup overloaded with additional actions; and, context menus support disruptive actions (displayed with a red color) as well as sub-menus and separators between actions. A context menu is presented immediately, in its entirety, following a 3D Touch press or a long press, and it’s more visually differentiated than Apple’s previous takes on action sheets.

A context menu in Files shows more options at once than iOS 12’s old copy and paste menu.

Context menus support dark mode, disruptive actions, and sub-menus, such as the one implemented in Scriptable.

Even more options for context menu items.

Second, because context menus have replaced peek and pop and older action sheets across all of Apple’s devices and apps in iOS 13, they work everywhere, including iPhones and iPads that do not support 3D Touch. For the first time, iPad users have access to a preview system for links and email messages that is consistent with the iPhone.

A context menu for a link that was long-pressed on iPad.

Furthermore, while peek and pop displayed a preview first and forced you to swipe up to reveal contextual actions, previews and actions are always shown together with context menus. The preview is optional (it’s possible to have a context menu that only consists of actions), and the system also supports stacking the preview and actions vertically (with three actions or fewer) or horizontally (with actions on the side).

You needed to swipe up to see actions available for peek and pop in iOS 12.

Since context menus share the same activation gesture as drag and drop (a long press), they had to be designed around the possibility that the user may either want to preview or perform actions on the content they’re pressing or drag it away. There are a couple ways Apple worked around this scenario. If you long-press an item and the context menu comes up but then you change your mind and realize you want to drag it instead, you can just drag it away and the context menu will disappear, creating a drag item.

A context menu can become a drag item in iOS 13.

Alternatively, it’s possible to initiate drag and drop without triggering a context menu first. It’s very subtle, but if you pay close attention to how items in iOS 13 react to a long-press, you’ll notice how they shrink before “pulsing” back and opening a context menu. If you start the drag gesture shortly after holding down an item while it’s shrunk, it won’t open the context menu.

You can also start drag and drop without showing a context menu first.

I’ll admit right away that I’m sold on the idea of context menus as I believe they bring some much needed consistency to action sheets. Over the years, third-party developers have implemented a variety of contextual menus – some of them based on injecting actions into the copy and paste menu, others displaying entirely custom UIs. Apple’s proposed solution scales across the iPhone and iPad, is more accessible, supports dark mode by default, and, more importantly, lets the copy and paste menu go back to what it was originally designed for: copying and pasting during text selection.

Apple has done the right thing rethinking most of their apps around context menus in iOS 13; I even noticed that old apps (not compiled for iOS 13 yet) that used to rely on the copy and paste menu for custom actions (built using UIMenuItem and UIMenuController) get automatically upgraded to context menus in iOS 13 if their root view is the Files document browser.

MindNode got automatically upgraded to context menus thanks to the document browser.

That said, as a fan of 3D Touch, I don’t think context menus are objectively superior to peek and pop yet, particularly for previewing webpages. First, while peek and pop didn’t expose actions right away upon pressing an item, it displayed a larger preview that took better advantage of the iPhone’s limited display size, and actions were only a quick swipe away. From a mere preview perspective, I found the size of the peek and pop window more comfortable to read than its context menu counterpart.

Webpages offered taller previews with peek and pop.

Additionally, the whole point of peek and pop was leveraging 3D Touch’s pressure level recognition to enable multiple layers of interaction in a single gesture (the separate “peek” and “pop” stages). The new preview displayed in a context menu, however, is a one-level-deep gesture: after pressing an item to open a context menu that contains a preview, you can’t “pop” that item to open a full-screen view without lifting your finger off the screen, as was possible with 3D Touch before. Once a context menu preview is open, you have to lift your finger and tap the item to open it in full-screen.

This, to me, was one of the unsung advantages of 3D Touch: thanks to pressure recognition, it embedded multiple commands within the same gesture, thus aiding one-handed interactions on larger phones. Context menus trade the convenience of a large preview for actions displayed at all times, which is fair; what I don’t understand is why devices with 3D Touch couldn’t keep a variation of the peek and pop gesture. I’m guessing that, in a world without new 3D Touch-enabled iPhones, it’s easier to pretend it never existed – a damnatio memoriae for an iPhone feature Apple would like us all to forget about.

Let me be clear: I prefer having context menus available across the iPhone and iPad, with support for rich previews and actions, rather than be stuck with 3D Touch on iPhones alone. At the same time, it’s worth pointing out that 3D Touch’s peek and pop system was designed around a faster gesture and had a larger preview. Even though its replacement is superior in many ways, I think it’s okay to miss what 3D Touch was good at.

Drafts has adopted context menus in iPadOS 13.

Are there ways for Apple to improve context menus by borrowing from 3D Touch? For starters, particularly on iPads and the iPhone XS Max, the preview window could be bigger – it does feel absurdly small on a 12.9" iPad Pro.

A small preview on a big screen.

Furthermore, Apple should ensure that context menus work in all instances where users might expect them to: for instance, long-pressing a link in Messages doesn’t bring up a webpage preview (this used to work with 3D Touch); the same gesture in Reminders displays a ‘Large/Small Images’ attachment control button for links, but not a rich preview for the destination webpage. Lastly, if Apple is getting rid of pressure sensitivity in future iPhones for good, they should at least maintain backwards compatibility for peek and pop on iPhones that do have 3D Touch, and integrate its multiple pressure levels with context menus’ preview window.

Despite my criticism and comparisons to 3D Touch, I believe context menus are poised to become one of the most useful additions to UIKit in years. Particularly on iPad, which never offered 3D Touch, context menus simplify interactions that required developers to either shove actions into the copy and paste menu or write custom contextual menus from scratch (not to mention rich previews). The consistent activation and presentation of context menus across apps brings a welcome new UI layer to iOS and iPadOS; judging from Apple’s examples and third-party apps I was able to test this summer, I have a feeling context menus will enjoy widespread adoption among developers.

SF Symbols

There’s a reason iOS 13’s context menus look consistent between different apps: beyond the appearance of the individual cells and shared activation method, their button labels are often accompanied by SF Symbols, a collection of 1,500 glyphs designed by Apple and made available to developers for free. SF Symbols match the visual characteristics of the San Francisco typeface and behave like fonts as well.

According to Apple, designing and releasing SF Symbols became necessary when they realized that their previous glyph set (which was not available for developers to use) was too thin for dark mode; iOS 12’s old toolbar icons, for instance, likely weren’t legible enough against dark backgrounds. It’s easy to imagine why by comparing the same icons between iOS 12 and iOS 13:

SF Symbols in Mail.

SF Symbols are thicker, rounder, and friendlier than toolbar glyphs in iOS 12.

The “thin and sharp” aesthetic that sprung forward with iOS 7 didn’t sit well with modern Apple’s affair with bold typography, rounder elements, and more approachable buttons. The last vestige of Jony’s original iOS 7 vision has been on its way out for quite some time: thicker strokes, rounded corners, and an overall “friendlier” tone are back in fashion with glyph designers at Apple. iOS 13 dispenses with thin and angular glyphs throughout the system, and does so in a way that’s consistent with San Francisco and designed with accessibility in mind.

SF Symbols come in three sizes (small, medium, and large) and support 9 weights, from Ultralight to Strong, just like San Francisco fonts.

Multiple weights for SF Symbols.

Symbols have embedded baseline values that allow them to follow iOS’ Dynamic Type setting: if you make the system’s text size larger, SF Symbols can scale along with fonts by gaining a thicker stroke and larger size – all while remaining crisp on Retina displays and legible in both light and dark modes. This automatic accessibility tie-in is a strong argument in favor of SF Symbols, which you’ll find used in app toolbars…

With ‘Bold Text’ enabled in Accessibility, SF Symbols gain a thicker stroke.

…context menus…

SF Symbols grow bigger with larger text sizes.

…or other glyphs throughout iOS:

Both the ‘i’ and phone icons are SF Symbols.

￼Designers vs. SF Symbols

It should be noted that prominent voices in the design community have expressed their concerns over the techniques employed by Apple to draw glyphs in apps using SF Symbols; while I understand the technical motivations behind these criticisms, in practice, I can’t notice any meaningful visual differences between Apple’s font-based symbols and traditional image-based glyphs in apps. There’s an argument to be made for our desire to see Apple sweat the details; however, as much as I’ve tried, my eyesight thinks the details of SF Symbols look great in everyday use, and I just can’t see the issues some designers have been reporting for months. Judging from my conversations with MacStories readers and app developers, I think the vast majority of users will appreciate the friendly and consistent look of SF Symbols.

I’m not a developer, but if I were, I’d welcome the release of a free glyph set with 1,500 symbols to choose from that’s baked into the system and supports various display modes, including larger text sizes, out of the box. SF Symbols are another example of Apple chipping away at iOS’ design imbalances: all of Apple’s apps now offer a common take on toolbar icons and other glyphs, and it’s smart of the company to open this up to developers. Good riddance, iOS 7 glyphs.

Share Sheet

After somewhat of a false start in the beta period earlier this summer, iOS 13’s redesigned share sheet has turned out to be one of my most appreciated improvements to the system. I was very skeptical of Apple’s ideas at first; by listening to feedback and iterating the design over the span of multiple betas, I believe they’ve managed to ship the best version of the share sheet the platform has seen to date.

The new share sheet revolves around two key concepts that have influenced its refreshed design: there is a new section for intelligent sharing suggestion based on your contacts, and action extensions have been reorganized with favorites, app-specific actions, and shortcuts.

The new share sheet in iOS 13.

By default, the share sheet is presented as a card that slides up from the bottom to cover roughly half of the screen. The sheet features a header that displays the type and name of content being shared, and it’s followed by contact suggestions and share extensions laid out in two horizontal, scrollable trays. Upon first glance, the rows of icons are consistent with the scrolling behavior of the old share sheet, resulting in a familiar experience for those seeking to share a photo or link with friends or on social networks.

The new share sheet’s big change lies in where action extensions are located and how they’re presented to users: instead of a third row of icons, actions are now a vertical list, which is divided into favorites, actions specific to the current app, and other extensions. Actions are grouped in sections using padded table views (more on this later) and they’re displayed with a left-aligned text label and a small glyph on the right side. By default, only a couple items from your favorite action extensions are displayed when the share sheet comes up as a half-sized panel; you can reveal the full share sheet by swiping it upward, thus turning it into a full-screen card.

The new vertical list of actions in the share sheet. App-specific actions (such as Safari’s ‘Find on Page’) are contained within a section in the middle.

On iPad, the share sheet features the same design and organization of sections, but, unless the current app is in a compact size class, it’s a popover rather than a card.

There’s a lot to digest here, so let’s go over each section individually.

The header section addresses one of the most frequent criticisms of the old share sheet: after it was invoked, it was impossible to confirm which type of item was being shared with extensions, nor was there any control to modify the item in-place before sharing it. The new header remedies these shortcomings with a handful of nice touches.

First, there’s a thumbnail that apps can use to preview the content that was passed to the share sheet. In Safari, for instance, you’ll see a webpage favicon as the thumbnail; in Photos, you’ll get a small preview of the image you’ve selected; if you select some text anywhere in the system and hit ‘Share’ from the copy and paste menu, the thumbnail will show you a ‘Text’ icon to indicate you’re sharing a plain text item with apps. Developers can customize the appearance of the thumbnail for content shared from their apps; the thumbnail is loaded asynchronously from the rest of the share sheet, so custom images can be fetched from the Internet without blocking interactions in the sheet.

Different thumbnails for the share sheet’s header. Scriptable (right) can pass a custom thumbnail when sharing a script.

The share sheet offers two fields – title and subtitle – to describe the shared item. In Apple’s apps, the title tends to be the name of the document, page, or content type being shared; the company was more creative with its implementation of subtitles. In Safari, the subtitle shows you the current webpage’s domain; in Files, you’ll get file type and size underneath a document’s name; in Music, a song’s name is the title and the artist goes into the subtitle field. In my experience, I’ve found these two fields useful descriptors of the item the share sheet is processing – information that was entirely absent from the old share sheet, which forced developers to rely on custom solutions that weren’t nearly as elegant or integrated with the share sheet as Apple’s new header.

The subtitle field of the new share sheet.

But that’s not all the share sheet’s header offers in iOS 13. For webpage links, photos, and, according to Apple, iWork documents2, the header comes with an ‘Options’ button that lets you configure an item’s format or metadata before sharing it.

Tap the ‘Options’ button in Safari and Photos to configure the format for the shared item.

For webpages shared from Safari or Safari View Controller, tapping the ‘Options’ button in the share sheet provides the ability to share a webpage with an automatic format choice, as a PDF, a web archive, or, in the case of articles, a PDF version of the webpage’s Safari Reader view. The ‘Automatic’ option picks the “most suitable format” depending on the app or action you share a webpage to. For example: if you share a webpage with the Deliveries action, iOS 13 will share it as a URL for the Deliveries extension to track it as a shipment; pick the ‘Save to Dropbox’ action, however, and the system will automatically pass the PDF version since Dropbox has marked PDF documents as files that can be uploaded from the extension to your account.

With ‘Automatic’ selected, Dropbox will get a PDF version of the webpage instead of its URL.

In most cases, you should keep the ‘Automatic’ sharing option enabled; in my tests, iOS 13 has done a great job intelligently adjusting the format based on the selected app or action extension, saving me time I would have otherwise spent printing a Safari webpage, pinching it open to get a PDF file out of it, and sharing that version with apps.

Select ‘Reader PDF’ and you’ll be able to save nicely-formatted versions of articles from Safari via the share sheet.

The ‘Options’ view is even more impressive in the Photos app, where Apple has built settings to control file format and metadata included within a photo. For starters, you can now force the share sheet to always share a photo either as a file or an iCloud.com link; interestingly, if you leave the default ‘Automatic’ option enabled and share photos with the Messages app, the system will look at the number of items you’re sharing and decide whether it should send them as files or create an iCloud.com link instead. In my tests, when ‘Automatic’ was enabled, sharing up to 9 photos would send them as files with location metadata attached; with 10 photos, iOS 13 always uploaded them to iCloud first to share them as an album expiring in a month. If Apple was looking for a way to spur adoption of its iCloud/Messages-based photo sharing system, direct share sheet integration is a clever option to try.

Options for the share sheet in Photos.

In addition to file format and iCloud sharing, you can also choose whether you want to include location metadata and all Photos data when sharing a photo with apps or actions. Besides geolocation information, all Photos data means a file will be sent in its original quality along with edit history and metadata such as keywords or descriptions. If you leave the ‘All Photos Data’ toggle checked and share photos via AirDrop, for instance, the recipient will be able to access the full edit history of an image, including filters and crops, which you may not necessarily want other people to see. On the other hand, if you do want to share all data contained within a photo with a close friend or family member, the share sheet now makes it extremely clear thanks to settings you can adjust at will. Personally, I keep ‘All Photos Data’ disabled so that most apps and contacts don’t get access to photo metadata, but I enable it when I want to share a photo in original quality with my close friends or family members.

Most of the new share sheet options were available in iOS before either as hidden settings or via third-party utilities. For this reason, I believe making these options front and center was a good decision, especially because they’ve been integrated with an automatic sharing system that removes much of the friction involved with picking the best file formats for apps. Not to mention how, by exposing location and all Photos data as visible settings, Apple is also raising awareness of the perils of sharing photos with personally identifiable information. My only wish is that third-party developers could provide their own options for the share sheet.

For most iPhone and iPad users, the inclusion of one-tap contact suggestions in the share sheet will likely turn out to be the most important change. And rightfully so: with one tap, you can now share to the nearest AirDrop device for someone in your contacts or instantly send something via iMessage. According to Apple, iOS 13 populates the contacts row by using machine learning to suggest different people or iMessage threads based on the content you’re sharing. In practice, you’ll find yourself having one-tap access to the contacts you text the most: tapping a profile picture brings up a Messages composer window for the selected recipient, and all you need to do is confirm by tapping ‘Send’. No more having to type in the ‘To:’ field to look up a contact by name, no more remembering what the custom name of an iMessage thread is.

Contact suggestions in the share sheet.

If you’re an iMessage user, I can’t stress it enough: this integration is glorious, vastly eclipsing what utilities such as Group Text+ did in the past as third-party extensions. Messages has to be one of the most common destinations for content shared from Safari, Photos, and other social apps; as a result of Apple’s integration of individual iMessage chats with the share sheet, I’ve found myself sharing links and photos over iMessage even more, creating a positive feedback loop reinforced by the new search tools available in the Messages app this year.

But there’s more: while your share sheet is likely going to be populated by Messages-specific contact suggestions, it appears that third-party messaging apps can integrate with the share sheet as well. I haven’t been able to test this integration myself yet, but my understanding is that if a third-party messaging app integrates with SiriKit, supports messaging intents, and ships with an updated configuration file for iOS 13, its conversations will be eligible for share sheet integration too. If this is the case, I’m curious to see whether the share sheet will provide an incentive for companies like Facebook and Twitter to further integrate with SiriKit and how well Apple’s intelligent system will be able to suggest contacts with profiles on different social networks. For now, the Messages integration is superb, but I’m keen to experiment with third-party integrations.

Moving on to the share extension row, there are two notable changes in iOS 13: AirDrop has finally received its own icon as if it were an app, and there’s a new way to access and configure additional share extensions from apps.

In order to leave room for the contact suggestions row in iOS 13, AirDrop sharing was moved to an icon that brings up a grid of ‘People’ and ‘Devices’ that can receive items via AirDrop (‘Devices’ are Apple devices associated with your Apple ID that are also nearby). I was fine with Apple’s previous implementation of AirDrop, but I prefer having the extra row for iMessage suggestions and AirDrop as a standalone “app” given my usage habits. Plus, the AirDrop panel now fits more contacts and devices in a single screen, which is a nice benefit.

In iOS 13.1, Apple devices are presented with nice device-specific icons.

The row dedicated to share extensions is now split into ‘Favorites’ and ‘Suggestions’, which you can configure by scrolling to the end and tapping the ‘More’ button.

Using share extensions in iOS 13.

There are a handful of conceptual differences with iOS 12’s share sheet worth considering here. In iOS 12, you either had an app extension enabled or you didn’t. You could put extensions in the order you’d like, but there was no visual or functional difference between them. Two things have changed in iOS 13: the system can intelligently suggest extensions based on the content you’re sharing (thus switching their order in the share sheet), and the screen you access by tapping the ‘More’ button isn’t just a configuration tool – you can tap on extensions from this screen as well.

Configuring share extensions in iOS 12 and iOS 13.

Here’s how this works: if you want to have fast access to share extensions you frequently use, you add them to your favorites by tapping ‘Edit’ and the green plus button. Favorites are always presented first in the share sheet, and they’re always in the order you’ve set. AirDrop is the only default favorite item that can never be deleted or reordered.

All other available extensions fall under the ‘Suggestions’ category, where they can be disabled with an on/off toggle, but not manually reordered because it’s iOS that dynamically switches their position based on the item being processed by the share sheet. iOS 13, however, only shows up to three suggested extensions after your favorites; to view others and use them, you’ll have to tap the ‘More’ button and open the resulting panel, which is now labeled ‘Apps’.

App suggestions are indeed dynamic, and iOS 13 does a reasonably good job at surfacing them: in Safari, for instance, the News, Mail, and Dropbox extensions are typically suggested after my favorites, but WhatsApp replaces News when I share something from Twitter.

My favorites end with the Working Copy extension. The rest are all dynamic suggestions by the system.

This new system of favorites and suggestions takes a while to get used to: there are multiple layers of organization now, and if you’re someone who cares about the exact position of your extensions, you’re going to have quite the day assigning favorites and disabling suggestions on all your devices. It’s worth remembering, however, that the majority of iOS users will likely only assign a couple of favorites, never bother with fine-tuning settings for each extension, and leave it up to the system to decide which extensions to suggest. From this perspective, I think Apple’s done a good job at finding a balance between power and casual users alike with a blend of deeper controls and intelligent suggestions.

The Actions portion of the new share sheet follows the same organizational principles as share extensions, with some differences. Actions are displayed vertically as monochromatic buttons that are not dynamically suggested by the system – they always follow the order you’ve set. As with share extensions, you can assign favorites, which are always displayed at the beginning of the list, and view all other available action extensions, which are now simply labeled ‘Other Actions’. Actions specific to the current app, such as ‘Add to Home Screen’ in Safari or ‘Copy Link’ in Twitter, lie sandwiched between these two sections. When the share sheet is expanded as a full-screen card, these sections are not separated by headers – they’re grouped with padded table views instead.

The action list in Safari, Twitter, Music, and Apple News. The middle section contains app-specific actions; everything else is shared system-wide.

To customize actions, you need to tap an ‘Edit Actions…’ button at the bottom of the list. Unlike share extensions, this screen is only used for configuration purposes. When configuring actions, you can assign favorites both for system-wide actions as well as actions exclusive to the current app, and you can disable other actions with toggles. In a somewhat odd omission, app-specific actions cannot be reordered.

Customizing actions for Podcasts.

The wildcard of this section is Shortcuts. In iOS and iPadOS 13, the Shortcuts app is built into the system and no longer needs to be manually installed from the App Store. Among the many privileges this deeper integration affords, one that directly affects the share sheet is the removal of the standalone ‘Run Shortcut’ action extension. In iOS 13, all your custom shortcuts are now top-level actions in the share sheet: they’re not contained in a “master” extension anymore, and you can freely rearrange them anywhere in the action list.

In iOS 12, you had to open a separate extension to view your shortcuts. In iOS 13, your shortcuts are top-level items that can be intermixed with other actions.

The chief advantage of this new system is the time users are going to save when running their favorite shortcuts: instead of having to tap an extension, find a shortcut, then run it, individual shortcuts can now be executed immediately from the share sheet. The ability to mix and match app-related actions with individual shortcuts is great news for those who want to fine-tune the share sheet in their favorite apps to their exact needs; by configuring the input types for individual shortcuts in the Shortcuts app, I’ve been able to customize the share sheet for actions that show up only when sharing photos, in Safari, or in the App Store. In each of those apps, I now have a custom Favorites list that contains fast access to shortcuts and app-specific activity items, which wasn’t possible in iOS 12 and saves me a considerable amount of time in iOS 13.

There’s a change of mindset worth pointing out for heavy Shortcuts users though. In older versions of Shortcuts, its action extension carried the same design of the app’s main library: shortcuts were always arranged in the same order you had previously assigned in the app and were presented with the same custom colors. The old extension fed into the user’s muscle memory by extending the Shortcuts library UI to the system-wide share sheet. iOS 13 requires you to start thinking of shortcuts as standalone components of the share sheet rather than part of a single “source” extension. It takes a while to learn this, especially if you’re a power user with dozens of shortcuts now living as individual actions in the share sheet, but eventually the benefits of customization and control exceed any possible annoyance caused by this change.

What I believe leaves much to be desired is the complete lack of color for shortcuts in the new share sheet: what used to be a vibrant, colorful visualization of the user’s shortcut library is now a dull list of items that aren’t visually differentiated enough from each other due to the small monochrome glyphs (based on SF Symbols). In Workflow and Shortcuts, my eyes were able to scan the extension’s grid using shortcuts’ colors as visual coordinates, and that’s not possible in iOS 13.

Furthermore, by aligning actions’ text labels to the left and placing their glyphs on the opposite end of the cell, it takes me longer to scan each item: my eyes can’t associate a text label with its glyph as quickly as before, which slows down my interaction with the share sheet as I need more time to scroll a list of extensions and read their titles because color is gone and the glyph is too far away. The increased cognitive load and lack of information density is a problem of the entire Actions section of the new share sheet, not just shortcuts; however, it’s been most apparent for custom shortcuts since I have over 30 shortcuts I regularly use in the share sheet. I don’t think the current design scales well for users who, like me, don’t have 10 items in the Actions list, but more like 60 or 70.

It took me several weeks to warm up to the new share sheet design in iOS 13, and the design of the lower action list is the only aspect I think Apple hasn’t entirely figured out yet. By and large, the company has succeeded in everything else they set out to achieve: the addition of one-tap contact suggestions for message sharing is a fantastic time-saver, as is the simplified AirDrop access; the separation between favorites and suggested extensions has brought welcome simplification to app management in the share sheet while still enabling deeper personalization for advanced users; the ability to run shortcuts with one tap is a boon to productivity, and managing app-specific actions is easier than ever. After months of usage, I’m a fan of the new share sheet and I think Apple’s headed in the right direction.

Other Design Changes

It wouldn’t be a modern iOS release without a cornucopia of other smaller, yet interesting design tweaks that inform our understanding of Apple’s recent design ethos. Let’s take a look.

UI elements that descend from the top of the screen. This particular design element first appeared as part of the Apple Pencil charging/pairing animation with the 2018 iPad Pros, and it’s now used in a variety of contexts in iOS 13.

On iPhone, toggling the ringer switch displays a similar popup; Voice Control shows hints and recognized commands through these pill-shaped messages as well; new gestures for copy, paste, and undo reveal a segmented menu of the same shape and placement. In the future, I wouldn’t mind if Apple used this “transitional popup” design as a new minimized mode for notifications that occupies less space than a banner.

Padded table views. New in iOS 13, developers can set UITableViewStyle with an “inset grouped” property that marks the return of padded table views. Examples of these can be seen in Home’s accessory settings, the share sheet’s Options screen, Settings, and Reminders’ list sidebar:

Opener, a handy utility by Tim Johnsen to open links in third-party apps, has been updated to use the new inset style for table views:

As Opener demonstrates, inset table views look great on iPad as well.

Padded table views have a pleasant retro feel to them that looks nice with modern iOS design. Most of all, they do a better job than edge-to-edge tables at grouping related items together.

New segmented controls. Speaking of design elements that harken back to iOS’ first design era, segmented controls in iOS 13 have shed their flatness in favor of – you guessed it – depth to indicate an active selection. There’s even a subtle animation when switching between controls in the same segment.

Segmented controls have been redesigned in iOS 13.

I like the new look. It’s not as heavy-handed as iOS 6’s impressed style, and developers can tint segments with color. The result strikes a nice balance between old and new, making the control’s selected state easier to interpret for colorblind users who can’t rely on color alone.

Rich link previews for every app. This isn’t a design change per se, but it’s a new API that allows developers to enhance their apps’ appearance by easily supporting rich link previews with titles and cover images.

Up until iOS 13, rich links in Apple’s apps were only available in Notes (where they launched in iOS 9) and Messages (since iOS 10). Even then, the implementation between the two apps was different and inconsistent across platforms: Messages supported rich links featuring inline videos and tweets; Notes didn’t support rich tweets on iOS (but did on macOS) and offered a thumbnail option that was absent from Messages. If third-party developers wanted to adopt rich links modeled after Notes or Messages, they’d have to write a custom implementation based on crawling Open Graph meta tags from a linked resource, which explains why so few of them ever bothered to do so.

With iOS 13, Apple has built a LinkPresentation framework that developers can use in their apps to present rich link previews, and they’ve also done a better job at unifying rich links between Notes and Messages while also bringing them to another system app.

The LinkPresentation framework generates rich link previews with a standard design (which developers can customize) and provides an asynchronous API that abstracts the process of crawling a server for metadata such as title, hero image, or video URL (if any). Developers have a simple solution to request the different components of a webpage, which can then be assembled into a preview in their apps. This removes a lot of work that would typically be involved with generating rich links; hopefully, it’ll lead to more third-party apps adding them, using a design that mirrors Apple’s apps. The framework supports “specializations” such as videos and tweets with multiple images; it should even work with local file URLs to generate rich previews for documents stored on-device.

The latest version of Yoink uses the LinkPresentation framework to generate custom rich previews for URLs saved in the app.

Notes and Messages still implement link presentation in slightly different ways, but at least the same links are supported across both apps now; plus, Reminders is joining them in supporting rich link previews in iOS 13. In Notes and Reminders, it’s possible to choose between large and small previews (long-press a link and choose ‘Small/Large Images’ from the context menu) and links to tweets now show the tweet’s text while in compact mode; in Messages, link previews support inline video playback and tweets with multiple images, and they continue to be expanded by default.

Tweets properly expand as rich links in iOS 13’s Notes app.

Rich links in Reminders, Messages, and Notes. You can even play videos inside Reminders via rich links.

Unfortunately, there are still some inconsistencies in how Apple’s apps treat links to tweets. In Notes, the small thumbnail size shows a tweet’s text, but it’s a truncated version of it; when you switch to the large thumbnail size, the attachment only shows a large version of the author’s profile picture (or media attached to the tweet). In Reminders, which now supports link attachments thanks to a new ‘URL’ field in the task inspector, large attachments show the tweet’s full text – including multiple images in a grid – just like Messages does.

Notes and Reminders have different designs for rich links to tweets.

Rich links also show up at the bottom of Safari’s updated start page, which features suggestions for links shared in Messages, saved in Reading List, or open on other devices via iCloud Tabs.

Safari’s new start page.

I’m glad to see Apple make it easier for developers to add rich link previews to their apps. I would have liked to see more consistency between Messages and Notes still, or perhaps automatic link expansion in Mail and Contacts, but it’s a solid start.

San Francisco Rounded and New York. The rounded version of San Francisco that made its iOS debut a few months ago is now used in the new Reminders app. It’s got personality, and it looks good with the different colors of Reminders’ lists.

San Francisco Rounded in Reminders.

Furthermore, Apple has released New York, an all-new typeface “based on essential aspects of historical type styles” that was “designed to work on its own as well as alongside San Francisco”. I’m pretty sure it’s the same typeface Apple used in last year’s redesign of the Books app, but the only implementation of it I could find in iOS 13 was in Safari Reader. Perhaps it could be added as a font option in a Pages update.

In terms of developer adoption, there’s also a new API for apps to use the system’s rounded, serif, and monospaced fonts.

New ‘More’ button and buttons inside circles. Various apps in iOS 13 now come with an ellipsis button (the classic three-dot icon to reveal more options) available in the top-right corner of their UI. This can be seen in Notes, Messages, and Reminders; as some have noted, the use of this button is not entirely consistent across apps.

Ellipses. Ellipses everywhere.

Additionally, Apple has made certain call-to-action buttons more obviously tappable by enclosing them in circles, such as Messages’ compose button and Reminders’ ‘New Reminder’ button.

A refreshed look for widgets. Widgets in iOS 13 have a slightly updated appearance: the header of the widget has been removed, allowing the app’s icon and name to be unified with the rest of the widget’s panel:

The refreshed look for widgets in iOS 13.

It’s a minor visual tweak, but it lets widgets blend in with surrounding elements better – which helps on the new iPadOS Home screen, where widgets can coexist with app icons in landscape mode.

New volume hud. I saved the best for last: adjusting the volume in iOS 13 no longer brings up a large hud message in the middle of the screen. In its place, Apple is using a small vertical volume slider that swoops in from the left side of the screen and quickly collapses into an even thinner bar as you keep clicking the volume buttons. It’s much less obtrusive than before, and it no longer gets in the way of watching videos or playing games thanks to its quick transition.

The new iPhone volume slider.

You can also grab the volume slider with a finger: if you do so, you’ll be able to adjust the volume by swiping and both edges of the bar will trigger a subtle haptic tap when you reach either mute or max volume level. The transition between levels is very nicely designed here; in iOS 13.1, the slider features different icons based on where audio is currently playing.

Device icons in the volume slider.

Pressing and holding the volume buttons to lower or raise volume will play a series of haptic taps that grow or decrease in intensity until the slider reaches one of its edges. The custom haptic was designed to give you the illusion of “filling” a bar by pouring volume into it, and it succeeds: these taps remind me of one of the mini games in Nintendo’s 1-2 Switch game, which also leveraged the haptics provided by the console’s HD Rumble feature. The Taptic Engine gets close to that same feeling with the volume slider.

On iPad, the volume slider pops down from the top of the screen and also collapses into a thinner bar while the volume is being tweaked. The placement of the slider is ideal on iPad: since the system’s clock moved to the left, no content is usually displayed in the center of the status bar anymore.

The new volume slider strikes a nice balance of being informative and not too clever with its design (such as by tucking a small slider in the iPhone’s notch) while clearing out room for content and supporting both mechanical and gestural adjustments. This one deserves a proper, unanimous finally.

iOS 13’s design language is the most consistent Apple has been in a while, offering refreshed visual elements that bring a welcome sense of novelty as well as more features for casual and professional users alike. And because a mobile OS’ design is only as consistent as the tools made available to developers who write apps for it, iOS 13’s UI updates come with APIs and frameworks that should allow for rapid adoption among the developer community.

For the first time in a few years, it feels like Apple’s iOS design is being driven in one direction with a consistent voice behind it. Even without a redesign, there’s a clear sense that iOS design is evolving in iOS 13, which is great news for developers and, ultimately, users.

Files

When I last wrote about the state of the iPad in May, I dedicated an entire chapter to file management and shared my thoughts on the direction I would like Apple to take the Files app. From my conclusion:

When I started using the iPad as my primary computer seven years ago, iCloud Drive did not exist and I had to seek out apps with custom Dropbox sync features if I wanted to have some degree of consistency between files on my iPad and iPhone. At some point, I even resorted to writing my own Python scripts for Dropbox file access in Pythonista. File management on iPad has gotten better over the years, and I think my progressive transition from Dropbox text editors to a workflow built around iCloud Drive and file bookmarks sums up this evolution nicely. If you still think of file management on iOS as non-existent, a nearly impossible task, it’s very likely that your opinion is outdated and rooted in past beliefs. File management on iPad is much better than it used to be.

But, at the same time, it’s also obvious that Apple hasn’t advanced iPad file management quickly enough since the introduction of iCloud Drive in 2014 and the Files app in 2017. For professionals who want to use an iPad Pro as their primary computer, file management is perhaps the most important task of all (as also demonstrated by the sheer size of this chapter), and it requires a high degree of personalization, flexibility, and integration with apps.

I’ll cut right to the chase: the Files app in iOS and iPadOS 13 is exactly the kind of update I’ve been waiting for: a more flexible file manager inspired by the Mac’s Finder, but designed around multitouch and modern app integrations. Apple has addressed nearly all of the complaints and suggestions I raised in that article: from new views and file management features to support for external drives, Files has received a massive update, and unlocked powerful new possibilities for iPhone and iPad owners.

There’s very little Apple has left behind in this release, making Files, along with Safari, one of the most important app updates this year from a productivity standpoint.

Column View and Quick Look

In a first example of a feature obviously borrowed from the Finder, Files for iPadOS 13 offers a column view to easily navigate into nested file structures. But don’t let your imagination run wild – there’s nothing special about column view as it looks exactly as you’d think:

Column view.

And that’s a good thing: as I argued earlier this year, Apple figured out how to solve certain problems on the Mac decades ago; those ideas don’t need to be constantly reinvented for the sake of novelty. Column view is one of them: on a large display that favors landscape interfaces, it makes sense to split up a file manager’s window into multiple columns, each displaying a different directory. There’s nothing revolutionary about the iPad’s Files column view as the Finder (and other desktop file managers) have offered one for years, and that’s the point: it’s essential for Apple to recognize how the iPad, just like other “real” computers, can benefit from classic features that are still proving their worth today.

Column view works remarkably well on iPad: files and folders can be selected with a regular tap; when a folder is selected, the view advances to the next column, and you can browse all open folders by swiping anywhere in the middle of the column view. Column view is only available when the iPad app is in full-screen; even on the 12.9” iPad Pro, putting Files in any Split View configuration will automatically revert column view to list view.

Swiping takes over the gestures that normally allow you to delete files in list view: if you want to delete a file (or perform any other action on it), you’ll either have to long-press it to reveal a context menu or select it to open the inspector, which is the other major change enabled by column view.

The inspector in column view.

iOS’ Files app is not new to Quick Look-based inspector panels to view file metadata, but in previous versions they were hidden behind a long-press gesture and tucked into the copy and paste menu. In iOS 13, iPhone users can open the inspector by selecting the ‘Info’ button in a file’s context menu; in iPadOS 13, column view, like in the Finder, automatically advances and generates new columns until you reach a file, thus making the inspector the default “destination column” for all documents.

The inspector has been redesigned on iPhone as well.

Opening Files in Column View

Column view improves one of the most confusing aspects of Files by never automatically opening documents in an associated app: tapping a file in column view always shows you the inspector. If you want to open the selected file in an app, you have to tap the ‘Open’ button; alas, the system still doesn’t make it clear which app will launch when you press the ‘Open’ button.

You still need to go through the share sheet to open a selected file in apps.

In column view, if you want to open a file in a different app, you have to go through the extra step of tapping the ellipsis icon before selecting ‘Share’ and a ‘Copy to’ or ‘Open in’ extension from the share sheet. I still find this system quite obscure, and I wish iPadOS allowed me to pin specific apps as “quick launchers” to column view’s inspector.

Given the inspector’s more prominent role, Apple made sure to bring some notable enhancements in this release. First, the updated inspector shows more metadata than iOS 12, and data points are contextual to the file type being viewed. Images, for instance, have gained ‘Last opened’ and ‘Dimensions’; videos also have ‘Duration’. In addition to these basic attributes that are now exposed in the Files app, there’s a ‘Show More’ button that lets you display other metadata. You can choose to see codecs for video files3, resolution, alpha channel, and color profiles for images, and even security details or the encoding software used for PDFs. It feels…unusual to see this kind of file metadata on iOS, but it’s in line with the idea of Files becoming a mature file manager; more importantly, it plays well with the inspector’s new ability to modify certain files in-place using quick actions on iPad.

Sweet, sweet codecs.

You’ve likely heard this name before with macOS Mojave, so let me stop you right there: quick actions in the Files app for iPadOS 13 (they’re absent in iOS) are not as extensive as their Mac counterparts and you cannot install custom ones made by third-party developers either. Still, they’re a good start for actions that users commonly perform on images and videos: you can enter markup mode, rotate an image or convert it to PDF with one tap, annotate a PDF document, or even rotate a video and enter trimming mode just by pressing an icon next to the ‘Open’ button in the inspector.

iPadOS’ quick actions aren’t as advanced as the ones based on custom scripts (which exist in Mojave), but they nicely complement iOS’ improved video editing and markup tools; it’s also quite obvious where Apple may take this functionality in the future by opening it up to third-party developers or the Shortcuts app. I’d love to pin custom shortcuts to Files’ inspector and perform actions on a selected document.

I’ve always considered column view a natural fit for the iPad’s Files app: in 2017, Sam Beckett and I imagined how improved file management could look in iOS 11 (among other ideas), and you’ll see that our vision for column view closely resembled what Apple ended up shipping in iPadOS 13. I don’t mean to imply that we should be credited with the idea: my point is that column view always made sense for the iPad’s large display. I’m glad Apple listened to user feedback and brought column view over from macOS and integrated it with iOS’ existing inspector and Quick Look preview framework.4

Even though it’s only available in full-screen on iPad, column view has become my favorite way to browse files and folders on my iPad Pro. It’s how I manage business-related documents for MacStories and my growing collection of assets located under iCloud Drive/Shortcuts. Column view lends itself well to the iPad’s drag and drop file management environment: being able to pick up a file from a column and drop it in an adjacent one feels instantly familiar, and it greatly simplifies copy/move operations that would have previously required switching views or invoking menus. Column view’s inspector is a welcome addition for power users who seek advanced options to manage files; it could use more flexibility for apps and quick actions, but it’s already saved me a lot of time I would have otherwise spent accidentally opening documents rather than previewing them.

Managing Files

While the improvements brought by column view and the inspector are most effective on (and, to an extent, exclusive to) the iPad, the adoption of context menus allowed Apple to rethink how other file management features are exposed to users of all iOS devices. The result is a system that deprecates the overused copy and paste menu in favor of richer menus with more options than before, allowing Files to behave more like a traditional file manager.

Long-pressing a document in the new Files app opens the following context menu in iOS and iPadOS 13:

A context menu for a selected file.

Folders show a similar menu with different options:

A context menu for a selected folder.

There’s a lot to unpack here, and menus change depending on the type of selected item, so let’s evaluate the differences with iOS 12 step by step. At a high level, Files’ new context menu is a faster way to reveal commands that were previously hidden in the copy and paste menu. In iOS 12, if you wanted to access tags or the inspector for a selected file, you had to long-press, let go, then navigate with arrows in the copy and paste popup; in iOS 13, you just need to long-press an item and the context menu comes up instantly, revealing all supported commands at once.

Bye bye, custom copy and paste menu.

As I explained in the Context Menus section, there’s a real benefit to being able to see contextual options with a simple long-press: all file-related commands are displayed front and center; they’re more comfortable to parse thanks to symbols and colors; and they’re much easier to discover.

Apple has come to its senses and built native support for zip/unzip into the Files app. From a context menu, you can now compress any file or extract any existing archive in any file provider or instance of Files across the OS (i.e. the document browser).

Zip and unzip.

Archives are created and extracted in the same directory you’re currently viewing, like on the Mac. Apple is using the .zip format for compressed archives generated from Files; in my tests, I was also able to extract password-protected .zip archives. Unfortunately, Apple hasn’t brought support for .xip and .rar archives yet, and Files still can’t mount and unmount .dmg images, for which you’ll need a Mac.

Thanks to native archive uncompression in Files, I was able to delete third-party apps and shortcuts dedicated to creating and extracting archives. I felt very good about that, and I’m happy I can finally stop mentioning this feature.

In keeping with the theme of picking the low-hanging fruit of the old Files app, Apple updated the ‘Save to Files’ extension with the ability to create a new folder or rename5 a file upon saving it.

The updated ‘Save to Files’ extension.

It took a couple of years for Apple to get this extension to a usable state (it debuted in iOS 11), and it’s still not possible to tag a file while saving it, but I won’t complain for now. I just hope we won’t have to wait until iOS 15 for tagging to be rolled into the ‘Save to Files’ extension.

In May, I wrote about the odd limitations of local storage in Files: the app offered a storage location named ‘On My iPad/iPhone’, but it only showed up if you had a third-party app installed that stored documents locally on-device, and even then it wouldn’t let you create arbitrary files or folders inside it. As a result, I had to resort to using an app that created a folder in local storage where I could throw anything I wanted to store locally – a ridiculous predicament that I can’t believe Apple thought was an acceptable idea.

Improved local storage in Files.

In iOS and iPadOS 13, Files does the right thing: local storage is presented as one of the default file provider locations no matter which apps you have installed, and you can import any file or folder you want in it. As I’ll describe later, local storage can also be used as the default destination for Safari downloads, an option I’ve taken advantage of myself so that large files I download off the Internet do not automatically sync with iCloud Drive.

Lastly, keyboard shortcuts. If you have an iPad connected to an external keyboard, hold down the ⌘ key and you’ll notice an expanded collection of navigation options and commands that can be performed without touching the screen.

New keyboard shortcuts in Files for iOS 13.

From switching views and sorting to quickly opening commonly used folders, these shortcuts make Files keyboard-friendly and will be appreciated by iPad users who want to get as much work done from a keyboard as possible. The second page of the keyboard cheat sheet is particularly important as it reveals a major addition to Files in iOS and iPadOS 13, which is part of a bigger discussion surrounding file sources and iPad Pro: external servers.

USB Drives and SMB Servers

In my interview on AppStories, Apple’s software chief Craig Federighi pitched support for external USB drives in Files as “acknowledging the ’90s”, but I think there’s more to the feature than his tongue-in-cheek reference might imply. By opening Files to external USB storage devices and external servers (via the SMB protocol), Apple has come to terms with the reality that users want to treat the iPad Pro like a real computer; like it or not, for many that includes the ability to connect to USB drives, SD cards, or remote servers that contain media assets and work-related documents. So while USB drives might have been all the rage two decades ago before the advent of cloud services, there are still valid use cases for them today; it would be shortsighted for Apple to ignore them – especially after they put a USB-C port in the iPad Pro last year. And so it goes: the new Files app, both on the iPhone and iPad, supports browsing the contents of external USB devices as well as connecting to external servers via SMB. The whole experience resembles the Finder’s classic behavior, but there are some key differences worth noting.

Apple implemented access to external storage devices from Files in the most logical way: USB devices appear as locations in the Files sidebar; because Files is a systemwide layer on iOS that is shared with third-party apps, USB devices are also available in apps (updated for iOS and iPadOS 13) that support the Files picker or document browser.

Given its role as a centralized location for all kinds of documents and integrated apps, it always made sense for Files to be where USB drives would be accessed. However, in bringing this desktop functionality to iOS, Apple had to abstract much of the complexity involved with managing USB drives on a desktop computer.

Let’s start from the types of drives iOS can read: there is no Disk Utility app on iOS, and you can’t get any info about the format of a drive or its partition map. iOS and iPadOS 13 will work out of the box with any drive formatted as APFS, HFS+, FAT, or ExFAT.6 The contents of a drive are displayed with the same UI and features available for any other folder or file provider in the Files app.

Browsing files stored on an external ExFAT drive.

Drives can’t be renamed, partitioned, or even manually unmounted when connected to an iPhone or iPad. Which brings me to the other major difference from macOS: while on the desktop it is commonplace – if not downright recommended by the OS – to safely eject a drive from the Finder before physically unplugging it from a computer, Apple has dispensed with this requirement in iOS and iPadOS. There is no ‘Eject’ icon and no error messages: just plug in a drive when you need to access a document on it or copy files to it, then unplug it when you’re done. The system was designed so you don’t have to worry about any other task except accessing files or copying documents from your device onto external storage. But how? And where’s the catch?

First, an assumption. To allow users to yank out a USB drive when they’re done with it, Apple must have re-engineered its USB drivers so that no cached files are ever left pending between the system and a removable drive. My understanding is that external drive support was rewritten from the ground up in user space specifically for iOS and iPadOS, which allowed Apple to avoid using write caching.7

Second, what we do know about iOS’ integration with external drives is that third-party apps can only access their files directly if they support the Files picker or document browser. If an app uses the Files document browser as its root view, is compiled against the iOS 13 SDK, and supports the open-in-place Files feature, it’ll be able to open a document stored on the drive and make changes to it directly without creating a duplicate copy. A good example of this is Jayson, Simon Støvring’s JSON editor for iOS: because the app uses the document browser and can edit documents in-place, it can navigate the contents of an external drive just like any other location of Files, pick a document from a drive, and modify it.

“From a developer’s point of view, there’s not really any difference between working with files in iCloud, on disk, or on an external drive”, Støvring told me.

If you’ve been following Apple’s approach to the Files framework over the past few years, I think you know where this is going. Support for external drives sparks immediate comparisons with macOS, where third-party apps can programmatically access (after a one-time permission prompt) the entire contents of an external drive; this is not possible on iOS or iPadOS yet. Third-party apps for iPhone or iPad can only read data from or write to external drives following manual interaction by the user, who has to select a file or pick a destination folder from a Files interface. Unlike macOS, apps on iOS can’t automatically import files from a drive (or back up files to a drive) unless the user has previously selected a file/folder from the external drive with a Files picker.

Here therefore lies Apple’s “catch”: to make dealing with external drives on iOS as seamless as possible, they’ve delegated the task to the Files framework, which comes with clear-cut security restrictions that prevent apps from accessing directories programmatically. By leveraging the Files framework, Apple is absolving developers from the need to think about write caching or issues that may arise with external drives8; as a result, the system is invisible to users (“it just works”), but developers won’t have the freedom they were probably expecting from a feature borrowed from macOS.

This is a classic example of Apple re-imagining an old feature for the new realities of iOS: the system gets rid of baggage while empowering users to accomplish the same tasks. I think Apple largely succeeded in this, and I understand why they designed external drive access around Files.

File Bookmarks and External Drives

In my tests with iPadOS 13, I noticed a major improvement to file bookmarks: it is now possible for apps to bookmark files or folders stored on an external drive, and those bookmarks will keep working even after a drive is unplugged and plugged back in.

Reading the contents of a bookmarked file from an external drive with Scriptable.

Accessing a bookmarked folder from an external drive with Scriptable. On the left, you can see the folder structure of my Sony Walkman, which I previously bookmarked in Scriptable.

This functionality opens the door to some fascinating possibilities for professional users. In the screenshots above, you can see how I was able to bookmark files and folders with Scriptable, which can resolve them any time the external drive that contains them is plugged into my iPad Pro. In theory, this means that pro apps such as LumaFusion or Lightroom could integrate with the Files framework and allow you to select an external directory once to create the bookmark and gain persistent access to it. This would allow apps to access external files or folders without forcing users to pick them manually every time, which would be a significant improvement for professional workflows that involve external SD cards or USB drives. I’m curious to see if any of the popular pro apps for iPad will support this in the near future.

It was important to explain the design of external drive access in iOS and iPadOS as we, as users, need to set our expectations accordingly. Even though we can now plug all sorts of drives and SD cards (via adapters) into our iPads, we still cannot have apps – such as Backblaze or Hazel – that automatically back up our documents to a drive or import files in specific apps as soon as a drive is plugged in.

That said, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the ability to plug USB drives and SD cards into my iPad Pro over the past few months. The feature has removed that tiny bit of lingering friction in my iPad workflow that was still forcing me to use a Mac for certain tasks.

For instance, one day I needed to print a PDF document I received via email. We don’t have a printer at home, but there’s a printing shop nearby where we can take a USB pen drive and they’ll print a document for us. Instead of switching contexts and sitting in front of my Mac to do it, I used drag and drop in Files to copy the PDF to the pen drive, which I then unplugged without thinking about it, and that was it. Another example: I own a Sony Walkman music player I use to listen to high-res music albums with my fancy Sony headphones. The Walkman comes with its own local storage (which I don’t use), but also exposes the contents of its microSD card (formatted in ExFAT) when plugged into a computer. For several months, I had to download these albums on my Mac and transfer them to my Walkman using the Finder. With iPadOS 13, I can download albums directly to Files thanks to Safari’s new download manager; then, I can unzip their contents in Files and drop them into the Walkman’s SD storage. No need to leave the couch and go sit at my desk.

On a more serious note, native access to external storage has allowed me to save a considerable amount of time when transferring audio files from an SD card to my iPad Pro. As I detailed in May, I can now use the iPad Pro as a professional podcasting machine, and while the hardware setup is not ideal – and iPadOS 13 unfortunately doesn’t bring any improvements on this front – it is a solution that has worked well for me. The main bottleneck was transferring heavy .wav files at the end of a recording session; I ended up buying a Wi-Fi box that let me transfer files wirelessly to my iPad Pro in a couple of minutes since I couldn’t just plug my audio recorder’s SD card into the iPad Pro. With iPadOS 13, I can put the SD card into Apple’s own adapter and transfer it to my iPad Pro’s local storage in a few seconds.

In big and small ways, native, secure access to external storage devices in Files has enabled me to use the iPad Pro for more tasks and saved me time when podcasting via my mobile setup. This feature was long overdue, and even though it may not be as “open” as certain developers were expecting, it has worked fine for me, and it’s precisely what I wanted from Files.

Along the same lines, Files in iOS and iPadOS 13 sports direct integration with SMB servers. Designed for office environments as well as shared servers in the home, access to servers through the SMB protocol is built into the Files sidebar as a location you can manually connect to.

SMB connections have been modeled after iWork’s existing support for WebDAV servers: after tapping the ellipsis button at the top of the sidebar, you’ll see a ‘Connect to Server’ option that loads a menu where you can enter the server’s address followed by your credentials. Once connected, the SMB server will show up as a mounted location in Files so you can navigate the server’s file structure, preview files, and copy them to your device.

SMB access in Files.

I was able to test SMB integration with my Mac mini, which I have set up as a home server exposing its file system to logged-in users over SMB. For the most part, the functionality works as expected and has allowed me to import files from my Mac mini without using a third-party Files extension. Once I set up access to specific shared folders in macOS’ Sharing preferences, I was able to browse folders on my iPhone and iPad from Files (as well as the Files picker and document browser), preview documents with Quick Look, and transfer them wirelessly to my devices. Network performance was not optimal (it’s not clear whether Apple is using the SMB 1 or SMB 3 protocol) and it’s very possible that my Wi-Fi setup at home could use some adjustments (I’m using an Orbi mesh system), but it does work as advertised.

I can’t help but wish Apple had gone the extra mile with support for external servers in the Files app though. Files does not offer automatic discovery of nearby servers using Bonjour: the app displays a list of recently connected servers, and it remembers your credentials so you don’t have to type your username and password every time you connect, but it doesn’t automatically discover servers, nor does it let you create “bookmarks” for specific paths in the ‘Connect to Server’ window. Furthermore, unlike Anders Borum’s excellent Secure ShellFish file provider extension, Files does not support SFTP servers for secure access over SSH and doesn’t offer controls to debug server connections, specify initial paths, view access logs, or manage files downloaded offline.

Secure ShellFish (right) offers advanced controls for remote servers that Apple hasn’t brought to Files yet.

When I heard that Apple was extending Files with support for external servers, I hoped to see the same kind of rich functionality I’ve used in Secure ShellFish, or perhaps even FileExplorer Pro; instead, Apple has done the bare minimum work to enable basic access to files and folders over SMB, with no support for other types of connections (not even WebDAV, which continues to be exclusive to iWork). I was hoping I’d be able to stop using third-party extensions to connect to my Mac mini or FTP server over SSH, but that’s not the case with Files in iOS 13.

In an ideal scenario, we would all live in Craig Federighi’s perfect world in 2019, seamlessly sharing files with one another using AirDrop, iCloud links, and the occasional large attachment with Mail Drop. Reality is more complicated than the aspirational workflows of executive meetings at Apple Park though. To this day, people still exchange files with USB pen drives; photographers, vloggers, and other creators still have to access media assets on external drives; employees need to access files stored on shared servers no matter the device they’re using. For all these reasons, and despite the limitations I described above, I’m happy to see Apple acknowledge that the needs of three decades ago are still problems for a lot of folks using iPhones and iPads in 2019. Plus, the ’90s are back in fashion anyway.

The ability to plug in a USB drive or SD card and have it appear in the Files app is an obvious feature, but it breaks so many old assumptions of iOS (file transfers may be slow; access to a directory may be terminated unexpectedly) that it took a while for Apple to get it right. And for the most part, I think they did, building a secure system around the Files app that abstracts the complexities of the desktop while reaching a similar end goal. There’s plenty of room for growth, and I’m keen to see how third-party Files-based apps will adapt to this new world. Extending Files beyond the cloud and local storage was a necessary step, and Apple delivered in iOS and iPadOS 13.

And More

The changes to Files in iOS and iPadOS 13 don’t stop at new views, context menus, or integration with external file sources. Here are a few other highlights from this release.

Document scanner built into Files. The camera’s special scanner mode that launched as part of the Notes update in iOS 11 has been integrated into Files this year. Apple must have realized that enough users were scanning documents in Notes only to manually export them to iCloud Drive, so they’ve added a ‘Scan Documents’ button in the menu available at the top of the Files sidebar.

The document scanner is literally the same feature that’s available in Notes, only you can immediately save scanned PDFs in any Files location, including third-party ones. The document scanner is also available to third-party developers now thanks to the VisionKit framework.

Document browser “improvements”. As I noted earlier this year, if Apple wants to push adoption of the document browser among third-party developers, they ought to listen to feedback from the community regarding performance and customization options. I can’t comment on performance improvements yet as it’s a discussion that involves accessing third-party file storage services (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.) from the document browser, and those companies haven’t updated their file provider extensions yet. Apple only suggested the performance of the document browser has been improved this year, without getting into any more detail.

As far as customizations to the document browser itself go, developers can now choose to always show file extensions and tweak the text and aspect ratio of the default ‘Create Document’ button. It’s…not much, especially for developers who were hoping for deeper visual tweaks or control over views. I’m curious to see what apps like MindNode and PDF Viewer will do now.

File and folder access. Apple has added a new ‘Files and Folders’ option to Settings ⇾ Privacy that lists all apps that have requested access to a file or folder on the system. This list doesn’t expose details about the type of access for individual apps, but it appears that all apps that have requested some kind of access to an item – whether via the document browser or Files picker – will be displayed in this screen.

New controls for file and folder access.

You can turn off access to files and folders on a per-app basis; doing so for a document browser-based app, for instance, will outright prevent it from opening files the next time you launch it. I would have liked to see more information about the different kinds of file access, but it’s good to see these privacy enhancements regardless.

Tokenized searches. Apple is taking advantage of the new ability for apps to display tokenized filters and search suggestions in iOS 13’s search bars by letting you search more precisely in Files. The app now supports an array of suggested filters that you can add to your search query by tapping on them as you type (just like you could accept suggestions in Photos last year). There are suggestions for document types (“Images”, “Videos”, etc.), file types (“PNG Images”, “PDF document”, etc.), dates (“2019”), tags, and even shared status (“Is shared with others”). In Files, search tokens support copy and paste, they can be dragged and dropped, and can coexist with plain text queries in the search bar.

Tokenized file searches in iOS 13.

Furthermore, unlike iOS 12, iOS 13’s Files app lets you restrict a search to your recent documents or the current folder with a new segmented control:

iOS 13’s search filters are great in that they help you build advanced searches more quickly, but they come with a surprising asterisk attached: they can’t be saved for later. Despite the fact that we can now construct complex searches by combining multiple filters, it’s still not possible to pin searches to Files’ sidebar so that they can be reused later, returning a constantly-updating set of results. How nice would it be if you could create a saved search for “PDF documents tagged Finance from 2019” that didn’t force you to recreate those filters every time you need your tax documents? Now that Apple has built a UI for picking and combining search tokens, saving custom searches feels like the next logical step.

With the Files update in iOS and iPadOS 13, Apple is sending a clear message: they’re now comfortable with offering a powerful, professional file manager inspired by the Mac, but reimagined for iPhone and iPad.

When Apple relaunched the iCloud Drive app as Files in 2017, I had the impression they almost felt bad about having to face reality by offering a file manager on iOS, the platform that had long prided itself on letting go of the shackles of files and folders. As history has proven over the past couple of years though, rethinking file management around a new era of apps was the right sentiment, but it needed more work. With iOS and iPadOS 13 those early timid attempts have blossomed into a desktop-class column view, USB drive access, contextual menus packed with options, integrations with file servers, and more. All of this year’s Files features have been informed by ideas Apple had long perfected with the macOS Finder; in the process of rethinking them for touch, however, the company got rid of the inessential, refined core features, and shipped a stronger file manager that doesn’t feel out of place on the platform.

There’s still work to be done: tagging hasn’t been improved at all in iOS 13; Files still doesn’t display file versions at a system level, nor does it offer Time Machine-like functionality for continuous backups; new features such as external servers or tokenized searches could use many of the finer options available in the Finder. And key functionalities that were announced at WWDC – iCloud-based folder collaboration and file pinning – were mysteriously removed during the beta process, and we don’t know when (or if) they’ll be coming back. Despite all this, however, the foundation laid by iOS 11 in 2017 feels complete now, and the result is a more balanced blend of what’s great about the Mac’s Finder and iOS’ lighter, more intuitive nature.

I don’t need the Files app on my iPad to have all the same advanced functionalities of the Finder for macOS: I just want it to be good enough so I can stop relying on workarounds such as third-party apps and adapters to import and manage my files. This year’s new features don’t compromise the original vision behind Files – an app that can also be a filesystem layer shared between other apps. For the first time though, Files can now behave more like a traditional file manager and less like a glorified launcher for documents, and everyone’s going to benefit from it.

Safari

Besides Files, nowhere is Apple’s “inspired by the Mac, but based on iOS” approach more apparent than in the updated Safari for iPadOS, which literally advertises itself as Safari for Mac to websites.

But don’t let initial appearances fool you: Apple has done a lot more work than simply tweaking Safari’s user agent – all while adding new features that fit iPadOS’ underlying iOS architecture and which, more importantly, make Safari a better browser for iPhone users too.

Desktop-Class Browsing on iPadOS

We’ve all heard these complaints or experienced these issues before: despite the iPad Pro’s beautiful hardware and modern multitasking environment, popular web apps such as Google Docs and Squarespace did not work well (or at all) in Safari for iPad, offering lackluster mobile experiences that were ill-equipped for a powerful tablet. As it turns out, engineers at Apple were listening too, and for the past couple of years have been rebuilding Safari for iPadOS to tackle these problems on multiple fronts.

Real Google Docs, on an iPad, thanks to Safari for iPadOS 13.

As I noted above, Safari for iPad now presents itself as Safari for Mac on all iPad models by default. You can double-check this information on any web app that prints out the browser’s user agent string, which reveals how Safari for iPadOS is actually seen as Safari 13 for macOS 10.15 Catalina.

“Mac OS X 10.15.”

The updated user agent carries an obvious cosmetic change to Safari’s interface: the ‘Request Desktop Website’ feature has been replaced by ‘Request Mobile Website’ in the new View menu in the address bar. The only exception to this default desktop behavior is Slide Over: it wouldn’t make sense to load a desktop version of a website in Slide Over’s compact size class, where ‘Mobile Safari’ is still set as the user agent instead. As before, you can manually request a desktop website while in Slide Over mode.

The larger Safari window is seen by websites as desktop Safari; the compact window is still treated like a traditional mobile browser.

While tweaking the browser’s user agent9 is a good first step in the process of changing the web’s relationship with Safari for iPad – as third-party browsers such as iCab have demonstrated for a while – it’s not a panacea for Safari’s desktop woes. To make desktop web apps and sites properly work with the iPad’s touch controls, Apple had to apply deeper changes to the WebKit engine to ensure that websites designed for laptops with cursor input would support touch with no optimizations needed on their end. My understanding is that this was a lot of work for Apple’s Safari team, and the results of their efforts span a long list of technical improvements, but I want to provide a quick overview since it’s a fascinating evolution for Apple’s browser.

Safari for iPadOS renders webpages and dynamically adjusts the viewport so that content can fit on the iPad’s screen and text size can be boosted to maintain legibility. This is how, for example, the Google Docs desktop website can automatically reflow in Safari for iPadOS whether you’re using the browser in full-screen or Split View:

You have to pan around Google Docs’ editor a bit, but it’s entirely usable in Split View too.

From an interaction standpoint, the key difference between the real Safari for Mac and the iPad’s Safari “for Mac” is that on a desktop you click webpage elements, while on an iPad you tap them. On a desktop computer, the cursor-based interaction supports the idea of “hovering” over a UI element, a concept that is extraneous to the iPad as hovering with your fingers over the screen does nothing. If you’ve ever tried to use a desktop website in iOS 12 with drop-down menus that expand on hover, you know what this means: in the old version of Safari, those menus either wouldn’t expand at all or would mistakenly navigate to the wrong page. One of Apple’s biggest challenges with Safari for iPadOS was reconciling mouse input and scrolling with taps and swiping, and here’s what they’ve done: cursor clicks are mapped to taps on the iPad; however, if a website implements hover-based menus, Safari analyzes the webpage on the fly and uses heuristics to determine user intent and whether a tap should click an element or expand a menu, thus simulating a hover interaction with your fingers on a per-webpage basis.

A good example of this is the WordPress web app: on the desktop, hovering with the cursor over a post’s title in the main dashboard brings up a tray of post-related buttons; on iPadOS, tapping near the title simulates the hover event and loads the same actions, which remain displayed onscreen after the tap has occurred.

Those buttons are supposed to appear on hover; with the new Safari for iPad, they can appear after a tap.

It also helps that Apple enhanced Safari with support for pointer events, a hardware-agnostic web API that provides a layer of abstraction for different types of input methods such as mouse, stylus, or touch. If a website relies on pointer events to handle DOM events, its interactions should scale across desktops, smartphones, and tablets out of the box.

But that’s not all Apple has done to turn Safari into a truly desktop-class experience on iPadOS. Safari View Controller also loads websites in desktop mode by default, with no optimizations required for developers; WKWebView, the API to present custom web views in apps (without Safari View Controller), has similarly been updated with support for desktop-class browsing, though it will require some work from developers when loading and rendering webpages.

Both on the iPhone and iPad, Safari now features hardware-accelerated scrolling in every frame or region of a webpage, which results in a much smoother experience when scrolling inside various kinds of frames/content boxes embedded within webpages. An example of this, once again, is the visual post editor of WordPress: in iOS 12, scrolling inside the editor felt choppy and half-broken; in iOS 13, it’s as smooth as scrolling the rest of the webpage with support for rubber-banding and 60fps scrolling.

Smooth scrolling in the WordPress web app.

Media source extensions, a web API that allows web apps to control media streams via JavaScript, is now supported in Safari for iPadOS as well. The combination of this API with other desktop-class browsing changes in Safari has allowed the Netflix website to be supported in Safari for iPadOS. It’s quite remarkable how the full Netflix experience now “just works” in Safari, including its custom web player with support for buffering, overlays, and, of course, Picture in Picture mode enabled by HTML5 video.

Due to DRM, it’s impossible to take screenshots of Netflix’s web player on iPadOS, but it fully works in Safari.

Safari also supports custom keyboard shortcuts for websites in iPadOS 13. The obvious example here is the Gmail web app: besides the fact that the full Gmail web client works on iPad now – including features like the side panel or contextual menus – Gmail’s own keyboard shortcuts (which do not require a modifier key) work in Safari as they can override the browser’s default behavior. For instance, pressing ‘e’ on an external iPad keyboard while in Gmail will archive the selected conversation; ‘b’ will bring up snoozing options and ‘c’ will open the composer; you can even navigate between the sidebar and message list using ← and → then select messages with ↑ and ↓ as you would on a desktop computer. In my tests, all of the keyboard shortcuts supported by the Gmail web app for desktop browsers also worked in Safari for iPadOS; Safari tries to avoid conflicts with its own keyboard shortcuts as much as possible, sometimes going as far as ignoring its own shortcuts to prioritize those from the current webpage.

The full Gmail web app experience, now entirely usable in Safari for iPad.

Much to everyone’s relief, Google Docs is also fully supported and functional in iPadOS’ Safari. Docs offers a wide range of custom keyboard shortcuts for text editing, some of which conflict with Safari’s own shortcuts to control the browser. One example: ⌘⇧L, which is used by Docs to align text to the left and by Safari to toggle the browser’s sidebar. In iPadOS, if a Google document is open, Safari lets the webpage override its keyboard shortcut so that you can align text to the left instead of showing the browser’s sidebar. This is a reasonable decision by Apple – it’s how desktop browsers have always worked after all – and on iPad it works almost all the time. I’ve run into problems a few times over the past couple of months where a keyboard shortcut would trigger neither a specific feature on the webpage nor Safari’s command, but it happened sporadically, and it caused no disruption to my workflow as I could always activate the option by “clicking” the screen with my finger.

It’s incredible to think that Google Docs’ web app effectively didn’t work at all on iPad with iOS 12, and now it’s just as capable as its desktop version.

In my early look at Safari for iPadOS in June, I called my preliminary tests with Safari “impressive”. The experience has only gotten better over the past three months to the point where I would call desktop-class Safari just as fundamental an upgrade as multiwindow on iPad this year.

In the seven years I’ve been using the iPad as my primary computer, I’ve gotten used to the idea that certain websites just wouldn’t work in Safari; those assumptions no longer hold true in iPadOS. As I mentioned above, Google Docs, which we use for podcast show notes at AppStories and Dialog, is now fully usable in the iPad version of Safari, including rich text formatting and real-time chat. In fact, the Google Docs website accessed on iPadOS is now better than the Google Docs app for iPad, which only offers a subset of functionalities of the web client. Proper access to Google Docs was one of the reasons I still occasionally used a Mac for work, and that’s entirely gone with iPadOS. This change alone has saved me a lot of frustration since I no longer have to wait until I can use my Mac to access the full Google Docs experience.

No need to use the (limited) Dropbox app for iPad when the web app works great in Safari.

The Dropbox website works perfectly in Safari now, allowing me to access features such as file requests and versions that Dropbox never bothered to bring to its iOS app. The web automation service Zapier, whose action editor features expandable menus with nested variables, is also fine in iPad Safari.

I can now craft complex web automations directly on my iPad Pro.

YouTube now loads in desktop mode with an HTML5 video player that lets you pick video quality:

YouTube in desktop-class Safari for iPad.

You can use the desktop Twitter web app, which includes automatic dark mode for Safari and a widescreen design that’s better than Twitter’s own ridiculous iPad app:

Twitter in desktop Safari is better than Twitter’s native iPad app.

Broadly speaking, all kinds of websites that used to either load mobile versions or result in broken touch interactions on iPad should now behave just fine in iPadOS’ hybrid environment, where desktop mode blends with multitouch and external keyboards in one seamless experience.

Everything you knew about Safari for iPad has been turned on its head in iPadOS thanks to a desktop-class browsing mode that goes far beyond the old ‘Request Desktop Website’ feature of iOS 12. The new Safari has revitalized my podcast production workflow in key ways, allowing me to work on show notes at any point during the day, from anywhere, just by opening a Google Docs tab in Safari; it’s also just a better web browser, leveraging the iPad’s large screen to do web content justice after 10 years of unsatisfying mobile browsing. I’m convinced that desktop browsing in iPadOS will have huge ramifications for pro users, enterprise customers, education (Safari for iPad is effectively just as capable as Chrome for most web apps now), and web designers, and it’s among the very best features of iPadOS 13.

View Menu and Website Settings

To accommodate the increased flexibility of desktop browsing, and offer a unified location for options that had been scattered all over the place in the past few years, the new Safari (both on iPhone and iPad) has a revamped ‘View’ menu that encompasses Safari Reader, content blockers, and other options.

The new ‘View’ menu in Safari.

In iOS 12, Safari’s address bar (or, as Apple calls it, the “smart search field”) used to split Safari Reader, content blockers, and desktop mode across two buttons: on the left, a Reader icon could be tapped to engage text view or long-pressed to open Reader’s settings; on the right side, the refresh icon hid ‘Request Desktop Site’ and ‘Reload Without Content Blockers’ behind a long-press too. These advanced settings were fairly undiscoverable and caused frustration for users who, say, couldn’t figure out how to temporarily disable a content blocker or request the desktop version of a website.

Existing Safari features are more clearly presented in iOS 13.

In iOS 13, all these options have been grouped together and made easier to discover with a ‘View’ menu that is accessed by tapping the ‘aA’ icon in the address bar. The menu contains the usual Reader, desktop/mobile mode, and content blocker settings, but Apple figured they could use the space for a few new entries as well. In a nice accessibility move that is going to benefit everyone, Safari now comes with a built-in, prominent text zoom feature that lets you increase text sizes on websites (without breaking their responsive layouts) with -/+ buttons. As my eyesight gets progressively worse with age (sigh), I’ve taken advantage of this option myself for some of my favorite websites that have small default text sizes, and it works great.

In most cases, zoom shouldn’t break responsive layouts on websites.

The menu has a ‘Hide Toolbar’ button that collapses the browser’s top and right toolbar without having to scroll on a webpage. Both on iPhone and iPad, you can also swipe up on the toolbar to hide it. I’m not sure what the actual purpose of this feature is; I’ve been using it to take cleaner screenshots of Safari. The nice thing about the hidden toolbar is that it stays minimized even if you scroll back to the top of the page; the only way to bring it back is to tap the address bar.

The real star of the View menu, however, is the panel dedicated to individual website settings. For each website you visit in Safari, you can now control its default loading mode (desktop or mobile), automatic Reader activation, and content blockers; additionally, you can tweak whether permission prompts for camera, microphone, and location access should come up on each page load or be always allowed or denied.

Website settings in Safari.

There’s more: besides providing a single location in Safari to modify a website’s preferences, iOS 13 also offers a dedicated area in the Settings app to view all the options you’ve configured for all websites on your device. In the new ‘Settings for Websites’ section of Settings ⇾ Safari, you’ll see a list containing the aforementioned six options, plus page zoom, each listing the domains where a default setting was tweaked.

Dedicated website settings in iOS 13.

You can open each sub-section and change the selected preference for a single website again, change the default option for all websites, or clear all the preferences you’ve set. This is a remarkable amount of control Apple is giving users, and it’s consistent with the company’s message: these options expose key privacy features more clearly, and they contribute to making Safari a desktop-class experience. As someone who loves tweaking preferences and optimizing apps to my needs, I love that this is possible with Safari now.

Tapping ‘Show Reader View’ isn’t the only way to switch to Safari Reader in iOS 13. When an article loads in Safari, a Reader icon will flash for 2-3 seconds on the left side of the address bar before reverting to the ‘aA’ button. This means Safari determined that Reader mode was available during page load; if you tap the button while it’s shown, you’ll go straight to Safari Reader.

Different activation methods for Safari Reader.

Alternatively, if you’re reading an article and realize you want to switch to Reader but think opening the view menu is too cumbersome you can – surprise! – long-press the ‘aA’ button to trigger Reader mode. On modern iPhones, this gesture will also play a haptic tap through the iPhone’s Taptic Engine.

Apple replaced Times New Roman with New York in the updated Safari Reader for iOS 13.

Once in Reader mode, you can either long-press again to go back to Safari’s standard webpage view, or you can tap the ‘aA’ button to show Reader’s contextual menu for font and color options.

By implementing a View menu in Safari, Apple has unified settings that were previously undiscoverable due to hidden long-press gestures. In the process, they’ve provided more configuration possibilities on a per-website basis, which feed into the idea of Safari for iOS graduating to a mature, desktop-class browser status. I’m a fan of this approach, and I welcome the ability to set personalized preferences for my most visited websites.

Start Page

As part of the improvements to the smart search field, Apple has also taken time to expand the functionalities offered by the start page – the grid of websites that you see when tapping into the address bar or opening a new tab.

In iOS and iPadOS 13, suggestions have joined favorites and frequently visited websites in giving you one-tap shortcuts to links that Siri thinks you might be interested in. These links are presented as rich previews at the bottom of the page, and they’re powered by three main data sources: links shared in Messages, articles you’ve previously saved in Reading List, and webpages opened on other nearby devices via Continuity.

Safari’s new start page.

Siri suggestions in Safari display title, domain name, and source, such as ‘Messages’ and the name of a contact who shared a link in an iMessage thread. It’s not clear how Siri determines which messages with links are worth your attention or not; my understanding is that the assistant tries to surface recently shared links from threads you haven’t opened yet. Reading List-based links appear to just be randomly fetched from your queue and presented among other suggestions.

Historically, I haven’t found much value in similar Siri suggestions in Apple News, but I’ve found myself enjoying the timely recommendations displayed in Safari – especially because I tend to forget to open links my friends send me (and they send many). I also appreciate the options made available by Apple to train the suggestion system: if you long-press a Siri suggestion, you’ll see buttons to open a link in a new tab or in the background, as well as options to tell Siri to never suggest a specific website or suggest less from Messages/Reading List.

Training Siri suggestions in Safari.

In the future, it would be interesting to see Siri gain the ability to suggest links shared in other places such as third-party messaging apps, news reading apps, or the system clipboard. For now, as a heavy iMessage user, I’m glad that Safari and Siri are giving me fewer excuses to pretend I didn’t see a link John sent me via Messages.

￼Updated Multiwindow

Because multiwindow is now a feature of iPadOS for all apps, Apple has gotten rid of Safari’s custom split view mode (first introduced in iOS 10) and replaced it with native multiwindowing.

Multiple Safari windows in iPadOS 13 with support for native Split View and Slide Over.

I prefer the new feature to the old ad-hoc functionality. With iPadOS 13, you can now open true multiple windows for Safari: instead of being limited to a split-screen mode in a single Safari space, you can have multiple instances of the browser spread across the system and paired with different apps in different spaces. If you want to replicate Safari’s old behavior you can, but now you can also choose to have one Safari view take up 66% percent of one side of the screen and have another adjacent Safari window in compact mode. And just like other apps that support multiwindow in iPadOS, you can go overboard with the system and have, say, two Safari windows in Split View, plus a third in Slide Over, or perhaps even multiple Safari instances open in Slide Over and cycle through them.

I do this all the time with my RSS reader, Fiery Feeds: when I’m going through my feeds, I can drag headlines to the side of the screen to create multiple Safari windows for each article, which I will close once I’m done reading them all in Slide Over.

Multiple Safari windows opened from Fiery Feeds in Slide Over mode.

If you want to merge all tabs from all Safari windows into a single window, that’s also possible: long-press the tabs icon, select ‘Merge All Windows’, and you’ll collect everything back into a single window, closing the other ones. This hidden gesture is a nice way to “undo” multiwindow without losing data; I hope more iPad apps implement a similar merging feature soon.

Download Manager

I almost can’t believe I’m finally typing this after 12 years of iOS, but Safari now comes with a proper download manager to download files off the Internet. Safari’s download manager roughly works like on a Mac, but, unsurprisingly, it’s been rethought for iOS and its app ecosystem. Because of it, I actually prefer it to macOS’ classic download manager.

Here’s how the download manager works: after tapping a link that points to a downloadable file, Safari prompts you to download the linked resource and brings up a popup that lists all your ongoing (and completed) downloads along with their progress. The download manager doesn’t detail transfer speeds10, but it shows progress along with buttons to reveal the downloaded item in Files or cancel the download.

Downloading files with Safari is now possible.

While the old version of Safari had a well-hidden download mechanism, Safari for iOS 13 is more explicit about downloading files as it asks you with a modal prompt. Occasionally, Safari may still try to load a linked resource in a tab and visualize it with a Quick Look preview: when that happens – for example, with audio or video files – you can long-press a link to the file and choose ‘Download Linked File’ from the context menu to start a manual download instead.

If you have a direct URL to a file which gets previewed by Safari in Quick Look (such as this Oasis concert) and can’t use the ‘Download Linked File’ button, you can always use the ‘Save to Files’ extension from the share sheet instead.

Downloaded files are saved in iCloud Drive/Downloads by default; however, in Settings ⇾ Safari ⇾ Downloads, you can choose any Files location as the default destination for new downloads. Want to save downloaded files in local storage or, say, the Dropbox file provider? That’s possible in iPadOS: just pick a different location in Settings and the system will automatically create a ‘Downloads’ folder in the selected service. You can also select whether the list of downloaded items should be cleared from the manager’s popup after one day, upon successful download, or manually.

You can select any file provider as your default destination for downloads.

Impressively, on iPad you can drag files out of the download manager and drop them into apps if you don’t want to go through Files first.

Drag and drop is supported in Safari’s download manager.

It may have taken Apple too long to bring a download manager to Safari, but they did it right. Downloads continue in the background even if you close Safari and switch to other apps, and the integration with file provider extensions is the kind of detail that shows how macOS and iOS can solve the same problems in ways unique to each platform. Instead of forcing me to always save downloads locally in the Files app, like you’d save downloads in the Finder on a Mac, Safari lets me choose apps as destinations, which is how I think of working on my iPad. If I’m doing research around a particular topic and want to save files in Working Copy so I can later share them with my team using GitHub, I can; if those downloads are throwaway items I want to delete later, I can just throw them into Yoink and they won’t clutter my more important folder structure in iCloud Drive.

A download manager isn’t an exciting feature per se, but it’s long been a limitation for iPhone and iPad users who, over the years, had to use third-party apps or custom shortcuts to download files from the Internet. With iOS and iPadOS 13, Apple fixed the problem in an elegant way that makes sense for the platform. I’m glad I can check this feature off my wish list for good.

Other Safari Changes

Apple’s Safari team could have stopped at desktop-class browsing for iPadOS and the new download manager and we’d all be happy with this release. But there’s a lot more in the updated app worth pointing out.

More keyboard shortcuts. Support for keyboard shortcuts has been vastly expanded in Safari for iPadOS with over 30 new shortcuts that almost match all of the options available on macOS, including ⌘1…9 to switch between tabs.

Examples of new keyboard shortcuts in Safari for iPadOS 13.

Impressively, ⌘S can save a .webarchive version of a webpage in Files, which now natively previews webarchive documents via Quick Look. I love using the .webarchive format for research purposes, and the fact that Safari itself can generate web archives (so I don’t have to use a custom shortcut) is saving me a considerable amount of time. The .webarchive format is the best way to capture an original webpage and make it available offline, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wishes to have a permanent archive of an important webpage.

I can go on: you can use ⌘W to dismiss Safari View Controller; ‘Find on Page’ and ⌘G to navigate between results behave more like a desktop browser; you can search for the current webpage selection using ⌘E; you can show the download manager popup with ⌥⌘L and download a link by holding ⌥ while tapping it; at any point, you can hide the bookmarks bar with ⌥⌘B. It’s not a keyboard shortcut, but paginated scrolling (via the space bar and arrow keys) is also more fluid than before in iPadOS 13.

New tab options. Safari in iOS 13 offers a plethora of new tab management features that have been seemingly designed to aid folks who do a lot of research on their iPhones and iPads. Or perhaps Apple just wants to help those who can’t resist the urge to open hundreds of browser tabs.

Available as a popup suggestion upon clearing all tabs for the first time (long-press the tab icon) and as a preference in Settings ⇾ Safari, iOS 13 can now automatically close tabs you haven’t viewed in a day, week, or month. If you have a tab problem, Apple’s here for you with the fix.

New options for closing tabs automatically.

Let’s say, however, that the 25 tabs you have open for Wikipedia articles are actually important and you’re hoarding them for a specific reason. Now, by long-pressing the bookmarks icon in Safari you’ll be able to save all those tabs as a set, which ideally you’d place in a dedicated folder (you have to create the folder first though).

Long-press the bookmarks icon to save all tabs at once.

Once the folder is saved, you can long-press it to copy its contents (a list of URLs) or reopen all bookmarks as tabs at once. This is a great way to save a Safari session for later, clear your tabs, and reopen all bookmarked websites in a new window or space on your iPad.

Long-press a folder of bookmarks to reveal new options.

Safari has you covered for those times when you don’t want to save tabs for later but just manage them more quickly. By long-pressing a tab on iPad (on iPhone, you can long-press from the tab overview in landscape mode), you’ll get a context menu with options to copy the current tab’s URL, close all tabs except the selected one (I use this all the time), and arrange all tabs by title or website. As someone who tends to open too many Reddit tabs on his iPad, I’m relieved to have an easy solution to group and swipe them away.

There’s a context menu for everything in the new Safari.

Lastly, if you start typing in Safari’s smart search field and a tab that matches the same query is already open (even in other windows), Safari will display a ‘Switch to Tab’ section in its auto-completed results so you can avoid opening a new tab.

Now, if only I could convince Apple to bring all these tab management options to Reading List…

Choose photo upload size. When uploading an image from the photo library to a website, Safari now displays a message at the bottom of the picker that lets you choose a size before uploading it. This has come in handy when I needed to upload large PNG images that could only be shared as ‘Large’ instead of ‘Actual Size’.

You can now resize images before uploading them with Safari.

Disable link previews. Like other system apps, Safari has replaced 3D Touch’s peek and pop previews with context menus, which, for the first time, allow iPad users to quickly preview links by pressing on them. Among the options available in the context menu for pressing a link in Safari, you’ll also see ‘Hide Link Previews’. If you enable it, you’ll turn off link previews for all websites, so the next time you show a context menu for a link, you’ll see a box containing its URL instead.

You can show and hide link previews for Safari’s context menu.

You can turn on link previews again by opening the context menu and reverting the option to ‘Show Link Previews’.

New design for private mode. Given that dark mode now turns Safari’s window dark gray, Apple had to come up with a different design for the browser’s private mode. In iOS 13, private mode keeps Safari’s window chrome white but uses black toolbar glyphs instead of blue. In addition, in order to make it as obvious as possible that private mode is engaged, Safari always displays a large banner at the top of the start page when private mode is enabled. It’s impossible to miss.

When dark mode is enabled in “regular” browsing mode (left) Safari’s window turns black and uses blue glyphs. In private mode (center and right), Safari never uses blue glyphs and always displays a message at the top of the start page.

Technical changes. It’s worth pointing out a subset of other technical changes in this year’s Safari release: the Navigator Share API (which Apple soft-launched last year) is now officially supported so web apps can programmatically display the system’s share sheet; Safari can play HEVC video with alpha channel for transparency; Sign In with Apple (which we covered in a standalone story here) is fully integrated with Safari and Safari View Controller; Safari 13 supports the WebRTC screen capture API to enable web apps to capture the contents of what’s currently shown onscreen. Finally, in more important enhancements on the privacy and security side, Safari and Safari View Controller come with weak password warnings in iOS and iPadOS 13: if you try to use a pre-existing weak password when signing into a website, Safari will warn you and suggest you use a strong password instead.

I’ve often called Safari Apple’s crown jewel, but this year’s upgrade truly is one of the best the company has shipped in years. Desktop-class browsing alone is an outstanding improvement for the iPad’s platform, but Apple didn’t stop there; it improved core aspects of the Safari experience for every device and every type of user – from the average user who just wants to download a .zip file for work to the academic who needs to organize her collection of open tabs. In a way, “desktop-class Safari” doesn’t just mean real desktop websites on iPad: on both iPad and iPhone, it’s a design philosophy that has enriched Safari’s functionality everywhere and for everyone.

Despite all of these desktop-class improvements, Safari still feels as intuitive as ever. Apple found a way to make Safari as powerful as a desktop browser without disowning the experience of browsing the web on an iOS device: instead of simulating a trackpad onscreen, Apple mapped desktop interactions to touch; the download manager has been integrated with iOS’ existing support for Files and file provider extensions; the browser’s start page now takes advantage of iOS-specific shortcuts such as Siri suggestions and links from Messages. Safari is more powerful than ever, but it’s not any more complicated.

The new Safari is the perfect metaphor for iPadOS’ raison d’être: its changes were borrowed from the Mac, but they were also carefully redesigned and re-engineered to make the most of the modern iPad platform. And once again, Safari remains some of Apple’s finest software work on its platforms to date.

Photos

Following modern advancements in machine learning and image classification, tech companies have been on a mission to help us make sense of the thousands of pictures we take on our phones by resurfacing our most precious memories. More than a typical Silicon Valley fad, applying artificial intelligence to photo organization and search has become a necessity: as the cameras in our smartphones continue to unlock new shooting modes and improve in quality (or number), we find ourselves taking more pictures than we could possibly remember. So while in the smartphone’s first decade the built-in camera app was arguably the most important piece of software a vendor should focus on, the app used to browse, search, and share photos has now become an essential component of the experience for any company who’s serious about mobile photography.

This is apparent in iOS 13’s updated Photos app, which introduces three brand new, machine learning-powered views to browse photos and discover old moments. And even more than Apple’s former attempts at making Photos smarter with Memories, the For You page, and sharing recommendations, I believe this year’s updates have a chance to profoundly impact many users’ daily experience with the app.

Days, Months, and Years

The new Photos app dispenses with the Moments view (which categorized photos by location and time) and adds four new sections to the leftmost Photos tab: All Photos, Days, Months, and Years.11

From left to right: Years, Months, Days, and All Photos.

All Photos is the new default view of the Photos tab; while the name might suggest it’s an uninspired grid view for, well, all your photos, it’s got some tricks up its sleeve that, in my opinion, make it a perfect fit for the updated Photos app.

The new ‘All Photos’ view.

Unlike iOS 12’s default view, location and date separators are subtly overlaid over thumbnails in the All Photos section without creating separate groups of photos; the grid bleeds into the top edge of the display, a beautiful aesthetic that suggests more thumbnails are available by scrolling up. The lack of proper sections doesn’t mean the All Photos view has no organization whatsoever: rather than creating clusters of photos grouped by time and location as iOS 12 used to, iOS 13 uses headers in the upper left corner of the grid. A header indicates the location and timeframe for the photos currently shown onscreen, and updates as you scroll.

The All Photos view fits more photos onscreen at once and uses a header overlay instead of sections.

You can press on photos to preview them and show actions contained in a context menu – an interaction that I find faster than iOS 12’s peek and pop menu. My favorite detail of the All Photos view, however, is that it supports multiple zoom levels: pinch-open with two fingers, and you’ll make items in the grid larger until you end up with a scrollable column view that focuses on one photo or video at a time; pinch-close and you’ll zoom out.

Incredible performance and multiple zoom levels in the All Photos view.

At first when zoomed out, All Photos’ headers will display bigger groups of photos; then you’ll see headers for months; finally once you’re zoomed all the way back, you’ll reach the still impressive-looking year view, which has no separators in iOS 13 and is fun to scroll through to get a sense of the “color heat map” behind pictures taken during a specific year. I’ve always loved this view, and I’m glad Apple found a way to keep it – and even improve it – in iOS 13.

Multiple zoom levels in the All Photos view, including the impressive year view (right).

After using the new Photos app for three months, I believe the updated All Photos view is a better default for most people: it retains the basic organizational features of iOS 12 thanks to headers, but it’s more versatile due to multiple zoom levels, and its performance is remarkable. You can smoothly zoom in and out of thousands of photos with no stuttering, swiping across a decade of photos without the slightest slowdown. Animations are incredibly fluid, and I love watching how the grid transitions from years to months by making thumbnails bigger and updating the header’s label at the same time. It’s details like this – the combination of outstanding performance and elegant visual design – that allow Apple’s software to stand out among increasingly fierce competition. As we’ll see shortly for other sections of the app, the Photos team has done an incredible job blending high performance with polished design in what has become – at least in my opinion – the most technically and visually impressive app in iOS 13.

By the way: if you’re like me and can’t stop watching the zoom transitions in Photos for iPhone, take a look at the iPad version of the app, where the bigger screen makes the animation look impossibly fast:

Photos’ performance is impressive on iPad Pro as well.

On iPad, you can also choose to display thumbnails in the grid with their original aspect ratio – an option that is not available for iPhone users.

Tap the ‘Aspect/Square’ button in the top right corner of the iPad app to toggle between aspect ratios in the All Photos view.

Although the All Photos view is a solid addition to the app, it’s the least important change in iOS 13. The highlights of this year’s update are the new Days, Months, and Years views, intelligent tools Apple hopes will help users rediscover memories and find their best shots inside sprawling collections of pictures.

Here’s how it all works: Photos uses new machine learning techniques for image classification to determine which photos should be considered the “most important” ones. Various factors contribute to this analysis: subjects that are front and center, well-lit, and smiling; group photos taken at a particular location; Live Photos with a particular motion; and lots more going on behind the scenes that Apple hasn’t detailed yet. In these “curated” views, in addition to filtering the pictures it deems the best ones, Photos also removes duplicates, hides screenshots and photos of receipts and other types of documents, and assembles a flexible “collage” layout that feels dynamic and lively. Videos and Live Photos auto-play (a setting that can be disabled) with no audio as you scroll, creating the illusion that you’re flicking through a photo album from the Harry Potter series, where subjects in photos come alive as you look at them.

The new Days view in iOS 13.

The flexible thumbnail sizes, combined with the edge-to-edge layout and video auto-play create an environment in which browsing your photos feels more intimate and humane. Even more so than the Months or Years views – not to mention the existing For You page – swiping through the Days view feels like the fulfillment of Don Draper’s vision for the carousel – it creates a sentimental bond with the app, a personal connection that goes beyond memory alone.

In the new Photos tab, you can still quickly scroll to the top of any view by tapping the status bar. Similarly, you can scroll to the bottom of a view by tapping its name in the segmented control.

In my experience with the Days view, I’ve been positively impressed by Photos’ ability to filter out good photos among a roster of similar shots, remove screenshots, and focus on the best stuff. There’s the occasional image saved from the web or screen recording that creeps into these highlights, but no algorithm is ever so perfect that it can’t be complained about. Days succeeds as a way to effortlessly discover the best pictures you’ve recently taken; it also works well as a tool to get instant highlights from any past trip, vacation, or event12, which you can find by scrolling back in time or, even better, opening from the Months and Years views.

Moments’ Action Sheets

While in the Days view, you can still access options to play a movie for a “moment” or show photos on a map by tapping the ellipsis button next to a “key” shot (the bigger item in the grid) and choosing an action from the share sheet.

You can still show the photos contained in a “moment” on a map or generate a slideshow (with soundtracks) from within Photos. You can tap the numeric badge to view all photos belonging to a moment.

If a moment contains additional photos that were not highlighted in the Days view, you’ll also see badges that you can tap to reveal more. When you do, you’ll navigate from the Days view back to All Photos, as communicated by the segmented control in the Photos tab.

Months and Years serve to replace iOS 12’s Moments view and provide users with a denser visualization of groups of photos before drilling down into individual days or all photos. In the Months view, you’ll find multiple cards for each month that highlight different collections of photos based on time or location. The logic behind this feels consistent with iOS 12’s Moments, but the new design gives each card its own cover that comes to life thanks to auto-play. When you tap a card in the Months view to check out the photos inside it, the app takes you back to the Days view for that specific group of items, which reinforces the hierarchical structure of the Photos app in iOS 13.

The new Months view.

On iPad, Months uses a flexible layout where certain cards are bigger than others. I don’t know what the exact reasoning behind this is, but it’s fun.

Months is best used to break down your Photos library into different times of the year: in addition to time and location changes, Photos also recognizes holidays when generating cards, which means you’ll likely find albums for “Halloween” and “New Year’s Eve” when scrolling through your Months page.

With a swipe from the left edge of the screen while in Months view (or by tapping in the tab bar), you can then switch to the Years view, which creates one card per year. In this view, each card contains 12 photos – one per month – which automatically advance, carousel-style, when you’re not touching the screen. When you’re not scrolling between years, photo covers will animate and display the month in which they were taken.

The Years view of Photos in iOS 13. We were quite the crew in 2017.

A nice detail of the Years view is that you can preview the 12 photos that make up a card by holding down on it with a finger and scrubbing over it. On modern iPhones, you’ll feel a series of haptic taps when scrubbing through photos in a card. Once you’ve identified a photo you like from a card in the Years view, you can tap the cover and Photos will jump to the relevant section in the Months view.

Unlike other views in the app, Years is contextual: by default, it opens showing you photos taken today or around the current date in previous years. However, if you have birthdays assigned to anyone in your People album, the Photos tab will highlight photos of them on their birthday – something I was able to experience this summer for three different birthdays of people I’d saved both in my contacts and the People section of the Photos app.

There is a simple, yet remarkable way to test the underlying connection between Photos’ three different views in iOS 13: start scrolling quickly in the Days views, and while photos are still scrolling, tap the Months button; continue scrolling, switch to Years, then back to Months and Days again. As you scroll, the contents of your library will instantly reflow and sort themselves into cards or back to a grid layout. It’s a visually stunning effect that, besides showcasing Apple’s technical prowess, sums up the relationship between views in Photos and Apple’s goal with the app in iOS 13.

We live in an era defined by an abundance of photos and videos we capture within our smartphones every day – a surplus that’s in stark contrast with the relative paucity of truly intelligent tools to collect, browse, search, and rediscover important photos. Arguably, there are two major players in this space: Google Photos, with its cloud-based algorithms and potent search functionalities, and Apple’s Photos app, a highly efficient, private-by-design client that applies machine learning on-device to categorize photos and understand their contents. As time goes on, it’s becoming clear that Apple isn’t preoccupied with matching Google’s deeper search options or proactive editing suggestions; rather, Apple seems content building a Photos app that prioritizes discovering moments and sharing them with your closest friends and family members.

From this perspective, Photos’ iOS 13 update feels ripe for success: in my tests, the Days view has done a solid job curating a focused, polished visual diary of my life; it removes clutter and puts a smile on my face every time I scroll through old pictures and suddenly a live photo of my dogs Zelda and Ginger running at the park auto-plays in the middle of the screen. The Months and Years views have similarly helped me cherish the discovery of old moments and events that were always there in my library, just not highlighted as well as in iOS 13.

iOS 13’s new photo views create emotional connections that transcend photo organization.

This, I think, is the subtle difference that elevates iOS 13’s Photos above its predecessor: where iOS 12’s Photos was well-suited for organizing photos in moments, iOS 13’s new photo views create emotional connections that transcend photo organization.

We, as humans, hold onto our favorite memories not as files neatly sorted in folders, but as highlights in a messy, never-stopping reel. We can recall particular scenes with oddly specific detail: the sunlight hitting our partner’s face just right that day at the beach; that wrinkle in the shirt on the first day at the new job; feeling ridiculous taking a selfie with other tourists watching and waiting in line at the same spot in Paris. Our brains have limited capacity compared to computers, but, somehow, they make sense of our favorite memories and never let go of what makes them special and, ultimately, ours.

The irony of an algorithm trying to mimic the human brain’s photographic memory isn’t lost on me; but when its approximation is so well-executed, so fun, so delightfully serendipitous, what’s not to love?

New Editing Tools

The new Days, Months, and Years views are the most important aspect of Photos’ update this year, but we shouldn’t sleep on the completely revamped editing tools available for photos and videos either. In one fell swoop, Apple has added a prosumer-level editing suite to Photos and obviated the need for several third-party utilities.

The UI for editing photos and videos has been rebuilt in iOS 13 to allow for more options as well as the ability to zoom in while editing, so you can get up-close with the details of a shot you want to improve. In the adjustment panel, the Light, Color, and B&W sections have been removed, replaced by a scrollable row of controls that, in addition to existing ones, now include options such as vignette, definition, warmth, and noise reduction. You can change the intensity of every adjustment, and it’s easier to tell if you’ve performed multiple adjustments because each option is now a top-level item and gets highlighted in yellow when modified.

There are so many options available, it’s almost hard to believe this is the same Photos app Apple has been shipping to millions of customers for years now. But there’s more: every filter now supports adjustable intensity levels too, including the useful ‘Auto’, which is no longer an on/off toggle but an actual slider; you can now adjust the vertical and horizontal perspective of photos and videos; you can flip the canvas; there’s a new screen for cropping to a different aspect ratio that lets you pick the format and preferred orientation with a new UI that feels made for Instagram stories.

New controls for cropping Photos.

There’s great news for the video editor too: at long last, you can now trim a video without saving a duplicate; you can rotate videos without having to download an app from the App Store; you can even remove sound from a video with one tap. These were the most common complaints regarding video editing on iOS, and Apple has addressed them all at once in iOS 13.

You can zoom in on videos while editing them inside Photos.

It truly is amazing how much Apple invested in the idea of bringing professional editing features to consumers, getting to the essence of their functionality so they don’t feel too obscure or difficult to use. Even more impressive is the performance of it all: you can zoom into 4K videos as they’re playing, apply a filter, change the intensity of other values, and your iPhone won’t skip a beat. Thanks to the performance gains granted by HEIF, you can smoothly zoom in and out of photos, perform adjustments until you’ve gotten all the details right, and save without realizing you just performed a task that was unthinkable on a phone a few years ago. As per Photos’ tradition, all edits are non-destructive: you can always revert to an older version of a photo, selectively remove adjustments you’ve applied, and, thanks to the new share sheet, choose to share a version of a photo that contains all edits for others to undo or improve upon.

In the right hands, iOS 13’s new photo and video editing tools are going to prove exceptional additions to the Photos app from a creative standpoint. Apple could have just added an option to rotate videos and everyone would have been happy, but they’ve gone well beyond that and turned Photos into a semi-professional photo and video editing app. I wonder what the effect on similar third-party apps will be.

Extras

Here’s a collection of other small, yet welcome changes in Photos for iOS and iPadOS 13.

Extended Live Photo playback. In iOS 13, when you press and hold to play a live photo, Photos automatically extends video playback when you have Live Photos taken within 1.5 seconds of each other. If you tend to take multiple photos of something funny your kids or dogs are doing, this is a nice touch as you’ll end up watching a mini “live photo movie” that doesn’t need exporting. Another great detail: you can tell that live photo playback has extended from one photo to another by looking at the scrubber at the bottom of the screen.

Export multiple Live Photos as video. When you do want to export a collection of Live Photos as a video file, the Photos app in iOS 13 has you covered: select them, hit the share button, then choose ‘Save as Video’ from the share sheet. Photos will stitch all Live Photos together and save a new video in the library. This feature doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of dedicated solutions like Snapthread, but I bet it’s going to be enough for most people.

Screen Recordings. In iOS 13.1, Photos has gained a new Screen Recordings media type in the Albums page; as the name suggests, it collects all screen recordings you’ve saved in the Photos app, including those created on other devices and synced with iCloud Photo Library.

Multiple keywords in search. You can still tokenize search queries in the Photos app by tapping on individual suggestions and adding them to the search bar, but iOS 13 also allows you to just type and perform advanced searches in “plain text” without tapping to add tokens. As a result, Photos’ search is much easier to use than before as it feels more natural to type something and expect results. I’m not sure how popular Photos’ intelligent search feature is, but I’m glad Apple has put in the work to make it less clunky.

Reminders

For the past year, I’ve been using Reminders as my primary and only task manager. Or, I should clarify: I’ve been using the Reminders service as my task management system accessed via a third-party client, GoodTask. With iOS and iPadOS 13, as well as macOS Catalina and watchOS 6, Apple is debuting a completely redesigned and enhanced Reminders app, and, at least for the foreseeable future, I’m going all-in.

Those who follow my writing at MacStories know that I’ve had a…turbulent relationship with task managers over the years. I’ve tried many, and I’ve switched between wildly different apps on several occasions, only to later realize that those experiments were dictated by changing priorities in different moments of my life. When I first got into iOS automation with URL schemes years ago, I was fascinated by 2Do’s power-user features; years later, when I bought an Amazon Echo and started dabbling with web APIs in Workflow, I was lured by Todoist’s appeal as a web service. But for the past couple of years, as the MacStories team has stabilized and my responsibilities have shifted once again, I’ve learned to appreciate the comfort of Apple’s ecosystem, which includes access to reminders from any Apple device, whether it’s a HomePod, a cellular Apple Watch, or an iPad Pro with custom shortcuts. When it comes to integration between multiple platforms and native automation, nothing beats the pervasive nature of Reminders across the Apple ecosystem.

I like Reminders because my life has changed enough over the past couple years that I don’t need anything more complex than a handful of lists and tasks with due dates. Reminders is perfect for that, particularly if you enjoy the convenience of creating and managing your tasks in a multitude of contexts: I can ask Siri to quickly create reminders on my Watch while I’m at the dog park, but I can also query my HomePods about my schedule when I’m doing chores around the house; and when I need to process dozens of tasks at once, I can turn to Shortcuts’ built-in Reminders actions. Because Reminders is built into the OS, Siri doesn’t require a custom syntax to interact with it, nor does it suffer from the limitations that third-party task managers often run into. Ultimately, as I argued last year, it all comes down to comfort and a lack of friction: at this point in my life, I value not having to think about my task manager. Reminders is the only system that grants me that peace of mind.

The problem is, since its last redesign with iOS 7 in 2013, Apple’s native Reminders app has been a subpar experience at best. Its card-based navigation made it slow to use; besides personal aesthetic preferences, its design was clunky, with simple actions such as attaching dates or locations requiring several taps to complete. Reminders had been designed in an era when Apple still hadn’t found its stride in terms of creating apps that could scale from simple needs to advanced workflows. Consider Notes and Safari: both apps are used by millions of users on a daily basis, but since iOS 9 Apple has progressively improved them so they can accommodate different degrees of functionality for different users. Reminders, on the other hand, was seemingly abandoned, leaving the market open for third-party developers to build on top of the Reminders framework and offer superior, more flexible experiences.

All of this is changing with iOS and iPadOS 13: just like they did for Notes in iOS 9, Apple has gone back to the drawing board and reimagined Reminders with a modernized look and features that magnify what was already good about the app, making it faster, more intuitive, and more powerful. The new Reminders app doesn’t aim to replace power-user alternatives such as GoodTask and OmniFocus, but it also doesn’t need to: instead, Apple focused their efforts on finding the balance that can help an app scale across a variety of use cases, for millions of users across a family of devices.

With the new Reminders, Apple has kept what worked, redesigned what wasn’t working so well, and added new features that enhance its speed and customization. The result is not without flaws, but it’s what I was hoping Apple would do to Reminders in 2019, and perhaps even more. Let me explain.

A New Look

Reminders in iOS 13 carries a new design that revolves around the use of a sidebar (a page on iPhone) with colorful icons and two layers of organization. At the top, Apple has added four “smart lists”, which are large tappable buttons to quickly view reminders due today, all your scheduled tasks, all your reminders, and your flagged ones. Underneath smart lists, you’ll find all your lists, which can now be customized with new colors, glyphs, and groups. Obviously, the new app supports both light and dark modes in iOS 13.

The Scheduled view of the new Reminders app on iPad.

Dark mode for the new Reminders on iPhone.

The lack of a “master view” for all your lists was one of the biggest drawbacks of the old Reminders app on iPhone, which forced you to view your lists by flicking through a stack of cards. On iPad, the app did offer a sidebar for lists, but there wasn’t nearly enough contrast between them.

Quite the difference.

Not only does the new Reminders provide you with a unified ‘My Lists’ view, but it also lets you customize each list by choosing among 12 colors and 60 unique glyphs based on SF Symbols. To customize a list, you just need to swipe on it, tap the ‘i’ button, and pick colors and icons from the new appearance panel. While I would have liked to see even more color options and a wider set of symbols (I mean, Apple has 1,500 to choose from now), these new personalization features have been enough to bring a renewed sense of order and ownership to my lists. I love that my ‘Grocery’ list has a carrot icon now, while the ‘Family’ one has a dog paw (of course) and, appropriately, the ‘Writing’ one is red and features the classic MacStories bookmark.

You can also customize a list by selecting ‘Name & Appearance’ in its action sheet.

Speaking of order: lists can be re-arranged with drag and drop (even on iPhone) and you can create groups (effectively, folders) to keep related lists together and visually separate them from others. To create a group, hit ‘Edit’ in the upper right corner, select ‘Add Group’ in the bottom left corner, give it a name, and choose which lists to include. Lists contained in that group will be indented, and you can tap a chevron next to a group’s name to collapse or expand the group.

Assigning existing lists to a new group in Reminders.

Alas, you can’t customize icons for groups, and you can’t tap on a group and expect to see a view of all tasks for all lists contained in a group (sort of how projects work in Things). Groups are intended for basic organization of your lists only for now, and I’m fine with it. I’ve created two groups for ‘MacStories’ and ‘Family’, and I like that I can collapse either of them in the sidebar.

Aside from the visual changes related to new features I’ll describe later, the lists themselves have a cleaner, bolder look when you’re browsing your reminders. The list’s name is displayed in SF Rounded at the top of the screen; lists have abandoned their card-like appearance, paper texture, and letterpress effect for a standard white/black background that scales across light and dark mode. The ‘New Reminder’ button looks friendlier and occupies a more obvious place than before: it used to be a single ‘+’ button at the bottom of a list in iOS 12; now, it’s a colored button with an encircled glyph and thicker font, which makes it easier to reach with one hand.

What was that, a plus button for ants?

Another good comparison is the Scheduled view: in the new Reminders app, each day has its own bold subheading, which separates scheduled tasks more clearly.

Apple has also employed the ‘More’ button in the upper right corner of the screen – a recurring design element of iOS 13 – to provide users with access to list-related options: this menu is how you can customize the appearance of a list, edit reminders, share a list with other people, and show completed reminders; the latter filter works on a per-list basis.

Generally speaking, the new Reminders has a friendly, bolder look that meshes well with other Apple apps in iOS 13, but it’s also got its own personality thanks to SF Rounded and SF Symbols. The app’s visual flair, however, is only instrumental to its navigational changes and new functionalities, which have far greater impact on day-to-day usage than icons or colors alone.

Smart Lists

When Apple mentioned they were adding ‘smart lists’ to Reminders, four fixed rectangles at the top of a sidebar were not exactly what I had in mind. For years now, I’ve wished that Apple would take inspiration from GoodTask or Things to let you tag tasks and filter them by tag; in my mind, creating a “smart list”, like in GoodTask, would have entailed a way for users to assemble their own views with different filtering criteria, including tags, to easily find a subset of tasks.

Instead, smart lists in the Reminders app are four buttons that cannot be customized nor hidden. If you were expecting Reminders to offer some kind of true saved search or smart list functionality, you’ll be disappointed.

The bigger topic here is Apple’s institutional aversion to any kind of moderately advanced filtering feature for its iOS apps. I talked about this idea in an episode of AppStories last year: while third-party apps such as GoodTask, iA Writer, Keep It, and – guess what – Workflow have shown that it is indeed possible to adapt Mac-like filtering UIs to iPhones and iPads in the name of “desktop-class” experiences, Apple has long ignored this aspect of productivity apps.

Desktop-inspired filtering UIs in Shortcuts (left) and iA Writer.

Just like we still can’t create smart folders in Files, Music, or Mail for iOS, we also can’t create our own smart lists in Reminders. I have no idea why this is the case – especially if you consider how smart lists and saved searches are one of those inherently good ideas and solved problems that the Mac figured out decades ago, and which are ripe for an iOS reinterpretation. If the issue is not a deeply-rooted conviction that smart lists should never exist on iOS, then I have to believe it’s a matter of prioritization – that Apple still hasn’t found the time to build this feature for iOS. Read into this what you want; at the end of the day, Apple’s apps are worse because of this functionality’s absence, leaving room for third parties to innovate.

This is not to say I don’t like or use what Apple has shipped with Reminders’ smart lists this year. Tapping the Today and Scheduled views has become second nature for me when I open Reminders now; I believe both views are excellent time-saving tools if you need to see what’s on tap for the current day or upcoming week. I use both smart lists a lot, and I appreciate how they can be navigated with keyboard shortcuts on iPad. The Scheduled list is where I spend most of my time managing tasks these days.

At the same time though, I can’t shake the feeling that smart lists in Reminders could have been so much more: imagine if you could create custom lists for, say, “reminders from my Family lists due today” or “reminders from shared lists that are due this week”. Not to mention how additional filtering criteria could play into this: if Apple were to build a true smart list creation feature in Reminders, they could let you filter reminders that have attachments (a new option in iOS 13), those with subtasks (also new), or even reminders that have due dates but no due times. The possibilities are endless, and when you factor in the ability to give lists a color and unique icon, you end up with a potential system where you’re effectively designing your own sections for a task manager.

And maybe that is why true smart lists aren’t part of Reminders: despite Apple’s many improvements in iOS 13, which I will detail below, there’s still a fundamental tension between Reminders as a simple todo list app and Reminders as a task manager; I’m not sure Apple wants to steer the app in the direction of power-user features such as customizable smart lists yet. For now, I’m making my own “smart lists” for Reminders in Shortcuts, but I look forward to Apple figuring out how to rethink this functionality for iOS and iPadOS.

Creating and Managing Reminders

One of the key problems of Apple’s old Reminders app was the slowness involved with creating todos that contained dates and times: absent any kind of natural language input, the app forced you to type a reminder’s title, then open an inspector to select a due date and time manually with a date picker. That’s not the best approach when you want to quickly add a few reminders in a row and forget about them until they’re due. With iOS 13 and the new Reminders, not only has Apple fixed this limitation with natural language parsing, but they’ve also greatly enhanced how you can enter additional triggers or metadata without opening the inspector at all. The result is a speedier, richer app where tasks are faster to create and can contain more useful information.

First, Reminders now supports natural language parsing so you can type dates and times to use as due dates and alarms, respectively, without interacting with a date picker. Apple’s implementation of this feature is quite different from apps like Fantastical or GoodTask: when you’re adding a reminder, you can type commands like “today” or “tomorrow at 6pm” or “Monday 1pm” and they’ll be highlighted in blue next to the reminder’s title. When Reminders highlights text it interprets as a date or time, iOS puts a suggestion in the middle of the QuickType bar (above the keyboard) that displays the suggested date in full. Tap the suggestion to accept it, the date/time gets added to the reminder, and the text you typed is removed from the reminder’s title above.

It’s easier to show this in action:

Entering tasks with natural language input in Reminders.

On one hand, Apple’s take on natural language parsing requires an extra step compared to Fantastical and other apps; on the other, I like the manual confirmation as it ensures the system understood my command correctly. In my tests, Reminders successfully understood common commands, such as the ones I mentioned above, as well as more advanced queries including repeating schedules. I was able to create reminders due “every two Fridays at 3 PM”, “every day at 1PM”, and “every other day”. I’m sure that there will be edge cases for complex commands that Reminders can’t parse just yet13, but the system works well for the dates and times I typically throw at my task manager. The end result is a much faster experience when adding reminders that is leaps and bounds ahead of the old Reminders app in iOS 12. It does everything I need, and it’s nicely integrated with the system keyboard.

Examples of date-time queries supported by Reminders.

Natural language date parsing also shows one of the options for time-based reminders in iOS 13: the ability to create reminders due on a specific day without an exact time. Apple calls these “all-day reminders”, and they’re a welcome addition for all those who, like me, often need to do something on a specific day, but it can be done at any time during the day.

All-day reminders don’t have a due time attached.

There’s a setting that controls how you can be reminded of all-day tasks in Settings ⇾ Reminders ⇾ All-Day Reminders, where you can pick a default notification time.

My only wish at this point is for Apple to support the same logical separation between “today” and “this evening” that Cultured Code pioneered in Things; perhaps this might become possible with true smart lists in the future.

In addition to natural language support, Apple has built a new formatting bar into Reminders to quickly add certain attributes to tasks without typing. The formatting bar appears by tapping icons placed above the QuickType bar, and it contains shortcuts to assign due dates, create location triggers, add flags, and attach pictures or scanned documents to a reminder.

The new formatting bar in Reminders.

Even more than natural language parsing, the formatting bar has become my favorite way of editing reminders with a few taps. Typically, the calendar section of the bar offers buttons for “today”, “tomorrow”, and “this weekend”.14 I use these buttons all the time now when I want to reschedule a reminder with two taps; I like that there’s a ‘Custom’ option if I want to open the full inspector and enter a due time as well.

If default options in the formatting bar aren’t enough, you can always open the inspector.

The location section of the bar pulls the default ‘Home’ and ‘Work’ addresses of your contact card, allowing you to create reminders that will fire off when you arrive at home or work without searching for a location. There’s also a button to make a reminder due the next time you get in the car; previously, these car-based reminders could only be created by speaking to Siri, but now they’re just a tap away in Reminders’ formatting bar. If you need more control than what the location bar provides, you can tap ‘Custom’ to bring up a location inspector where you can decide between ‘Arriving/Leaving’ triggers, set a geofence, search for addresses manually, and find more suggestions.

Setting up location triggers in Reminders.

If you attach a location trigger to a reminder, it’ll be displayed as a nice location bubble underneath its title in any list view of the app.

Thanks to location shortcuts in the formatting bar, I’ve started taking advantage of these options more frequently. I always disliked having to search for addresses manually or asking Siri to create car-based reminders; the formatting bar is an elegant solution that’s saving me a lot of time.

There’s another trigger supported by Reminders in iOS 13 that is not exposed in the formatting bar, and which I’ve also found incredibly convenient: Messages. From the inspector, you can now enable a ‘Remind me when messaging’ toggle to create reminders that fire off the next time you send a text message to a specific contact in your address book.

I didn’t think I’d use this feature much when I first played around with it at WWDC, but over the past few months I’ve realized that I often keep a mental note of things to ask a specific contact when we’re having an iMessage conversation. With Reminders in iOS 13, I can relieve my brain of that responsibility by flipping a switch in a reminder’s inspector and picking a contact or, even better, by asking Siri to “remind me the next time I’m texting [contact]”, which is just perfect.

Spoiler: it’s not pizza.

It’s perhaps a small addition to the app in the grand scheme of things, but this integration encapsulates the advantages of Reminders as an iOS system feature: under the hood, ‘Remind me when messaging’ spans three frameworks (Reminders, Contacts, and Messages) and is capable of triggering notifications as soon as you tap ‘Send’ in the Messages app for any phone number or email address associated with a selected contact. No third-party app would be able to replicate this on iOS; for me, it’s one more reason to keep using Reminders.15

Back to the formatting bar, besides the one-tap shortcut to flag/unflag a reminder, there’s a fourth button (the camera one) that brings up a menu to add image attachments to a task. You have three options: you can take a new picture, choose from the library, or scan a document using the system’s document scanner UI.

Attaching images to a reminder.

Image attachments are previewed inline within a reminder as large thumbnails by default, but you can long-press on the preview and choose ‘Small Thumbnails’ if you’d rather save on vertical space in a list. Furthermore, Reminders can display up to four images in a grid as large thumbnails; if you add a fifth one, the grid will gain a label to tell you how many attachments are embedded. In another nice touch, if you’re using small thumbnails, image attachments will be presented as a horizontal tray underneath the title, and each can be tapped to open a full-screen preview.

Multiple image attachments in the same reminder.

I was hoping that Apple would add support for native file attachments to Reminders, but I’m disappointed to confirm that only images are supported in iOS 13. I rarely have to remind myself of photos or screenshots; I would have preferred the ability to pick any document, particularly PDFs, from a Files picker, but this isn’t possible yet. Scanned documents are also saved as images once they’re added to a reminder, which is not ideal for me as I usually have to scan receipts or documents and save them as PDFs for my accountant. The omission of a file picker is even more perplexing if you consider how, in the Calendar app for iOS 13, you can, in fact, add any document from Files as an attachment to an event. The addition of image attachments is a good first step as it allows Reminders to go beyond text-based tasks, but I would have liked to see more on this front.

To remove an image previously attached to a reminder, you’ll have to do so from the reminder’s inspector window.

Locations, Messages triggers, and images aren’t the only items that can show up as attachments to a reminder in iOS 13: available only through the inspector, Reminders now features a ‘URL’ field in addition to ‘Notes’ that lets you attach a web link to a task. As you can imagine, Reminders supports rich link previews in iOS 13, just like Notes and Messages: links will display the title of the webpage and a hero image; if you choose small thumbnails, you’ll only see the website’s domain and favicon.

You can also attach both images and links to a reminder simultaneously, which turns a task into a rich item that contains multiple objects when previewed in a list.

More display options for rich links.

As someone who links to other people’s articles on a daily basis, I find rich links a perfect fit for Reminders. I used to save tasks with links by embedding URLs in the ‘Notes’ field of a reminder using GoodTask, but those links were presented as raw URLs in the app; with Reminders in iOS 13, tasks I create from Safari or Twitter (the Reminders extension automatically appends a rich link to a task) allow me to glance at the app and know exactly what those links are pointing to.16 My only complaint is that I can’t quickly preview rich links inside Reminders with a context menu because the long-press gesture is dedicated to picking between small and large thumbnails. Aside from that, rich links have given all my web-based tasks a much nicer presentation that lets me reopen them in Safari with one tap.

At this point, you’d think that Apple built enough new functionality into the new Reminders app to call it a day and ship it. But in one last surprising twist, the company went beyond all expectations and extended Reminders with the ability to add subtasks as independent items embedded inside a “master” reminder.

You can create subtasks in two ways: from a reminder’s inspector, you can tap into the ‘Subtasks’ section and start adding reminders from a modal view; alternatively, if you’re in a list, you can swipe a reminder to the right and you’ll get an ‘Indent’ button that lets you turn a reminder into a subtask for the reminder above it.

Adding subtasks to a reminder. Each subtask is a reminder of its own, which can be assigned its own due date.

Swipe Gestures in the Today View

If you swipe right on reminders in the Today view, you’ll get two handy shortcuts to reschedule them tomorrow or postpone them until the weekend.

On the surface, subtasks seem like a handy way to bring checklist-type functionality to Reminders, allowing you to break tasks into multiple actionable steps that are ideal for packing lists, daily routines, or other recurring reminders. There is, however, more power hiding beneath the surface. Each subtask is a reminder in its own right: you can select a subtask and modify it with the formatting bar, adding time- or location-based triggers or even image attachments to it; if you open the inspector for a subtask, you’ll be able to add notes, a rich link, or choose to be reminded about it when you’re messaging a specific contact. The only limitation is that subtasks can’t have their own subtasks.

When working on this review, I relied on Reminders’ subtask functionality to organize tasks by chapter.

You can collapse subtasks with the chevron on the right. Unfortunately, this preference doesn’t stick: as soon as you switch lists or leave the Reminders app, all your subtasks will be expanded again.

Reminders’ New Sync Format

To use the new Reminders features in iOS and iPadOS 13, you’ll be asked to upgrade to the latest OS on all your devices currently using Reminders with iCloud. If you’re updating from iOS 12 to iOS 13 but also have other Apple devices signed into the same iCloud account to sync Reminders, you’ll be able to choose whether you want to upgrade the app’s sync format immediately (thus breaking compatibility with those devices) or later.

I have no idea what happened to that kbase link.

If you don’t upgrade Reminders right away but are sharing lists with someone who did upgrade to iOS 13, the system will put two useful “reminders” in the shared list (pictured above) explaining what happened to the list and how you can upgrade. As with Notes in iOS 9, Apple seems to be handling this transition well; however, given that iPadOS 13 and macOS Catalina haven’t been released to the public yet, keep in mind that upgrading Reminders’ sync format on iOS 13 today will halt iCloud sync on iPads and Macs still running iOS 12 and macOS Mojave, respectively.

Consider for a moment all the elements that can be attached to a reminder in iOS 13 and how they’re presented in a list. A single reminder, in theory, can contain triggers (such as locations or contacts), multiple images, a rich link, notes, and even subtasks, each with its own trigger, link, or attachment. When you look at a reminder that’s been formatted this way, Reminders doesn’t feel like the simplistic todo app that was only good to keep track of your groceries: it’s very close to an actual task manager at this point. Most of these advanced features, however, are only disclosed to those who need them through the additional step of opening the inspector. If you want to keep using Reminders for your groceries, you can; if you want to use it as a task manager with subtasks and image attachments, that’s also possible now; and if you want to use it for both – well, you just need to create multiple lists and use the app however you want.

Technically, this is one reminder.

With subtasks you can, effectively, nest reminders within each other, unlocking a second layer of task organization that is unprecedented for Apple’s Reminders – a utility that has refrained from implementing GTD-inspired concepts so far. To me, this is the most surprising effect of subtasks: the Reminders app – which I’ve long considered only good enough for my grocery list and not much else – now enables me to turn a reminder into an object that resembles a project with a deadline and multiple actionable steps – each with its own due triggers and attachments – that I can re-arrange with drag and drop. Subtasks were essential in the making of this review as I was finalizing changes related to each chapter; I’ve also begun integrating them with repeating reminders for work-related tasks I need to complete on a weekly basis. Of all the features I could have seen coming to Reminders, subtasks was not in my list, but Apple has done a solid job implementing them in this first release.17

A New Beginning

To understand the new Reminders app in iOS 13, we have to account for two concepts that permeate both iOS and iPadOS 13: progressive disclosure and scalability. For most people, Reminders can continue to operate as the simple, intuitive todo app for a handful of weekly tasks, only now it’s got a refreshed design, more colorful lists, and a faster way to enter dates. However, the same app reveals more power to those who seek it with features such as attachments, links, Messages reminders, and subtasks. The ability to scale from simple use cases to advanced workflows is what made Notes such a commendable upgrade in iOS 9, and it’s also what makes the new Reminders a remarkable rethinking of its aging iOS 7 version.

The new Reminders app is better than the old one in every way, but there’s still work to be done. As I noted in this chapter, tagging and custom smart lists are obvious candidates for Reminders’ new structure. The lack of file attachments is surprising given the app’s embrace of image and link attachments with rich previews. Individual lists still can’t be automatically sorted by date or time – a feature that hundreds of other todo apps offer today. And from an automation standpoint, the Reminders team hasn’t integrated the new reminder format with Shortcuts yet: the Reminders actions available in Shortcuts don’t let you attach images to tasks, add a link to the ‘URL’ field, or create reminders with subtasks. Now that the redesign has launched to the public, my hope is that the Reminders and Shortcuts teams at Apple will collaborate on new actions and updates to existing ones.

After using a third-party Reminders client designed for power users for a year, I approached Apple’s new Reminders with a single question: is it still just a todo app, or can it also be a task manager? To me, there’s a vast difference between those two classifications, and it ultimately comes down to flexibility. After three months spent using iOS 13’s new Reminders app every day, I get the impression that the engineers who worked on it also had this question on their minds because the answer is, unequivocally, “both”. Reminders can be both of those things. The new Reminders app walks a fine line between simple and complex, and it does so with an intuitive design that exposes new features clearly, with deeper options available to advanced users. In all of this, Reminders has retained all the advantages that made it special in the first place, such as its integration with Siri and Shortcuts, an Apple Watch app, and iCloud shared lists.

No third-party iOS developer has ever had to design a todo app or task manager that is pre-installed on hundreds of millions of devices. That’s always been a job for Apple. And with iOS 13’s relaunch of Reminders, not only has the company rectified what went wrong six years ago, but they’ve presented a coherent vision for Reminders that far exceeds my most optimistic wishes. By all measures, the new Reminders app has upended my expectations.

Shortcuts

Let’s play a game: if you were Apple, acquired a third-party app, and successfully relaunched it with a brand new name and system integrations, how would you follow that up a mere year later?

I’m guessing “redesign the whole thing” wouldn’t be at the top of your list of answers.

And yet that’s what Apple has done with Shortcuts in iOS and iPadOS 13: following last year’s relaunch of Workflow and introduction of a Siri shortcuts framework for third-party developers, Apple decided against letting its foot off the gas and instead shipped a redesigned, more deeply integrated version of Shortcuts that is now built into the operating system. Starting today, after upgrading to iOS 13, millions of users will find the Shortcuts app on their Home screens, ready to host simple shortcuts and complex automations in a single, unified library.

Without inside knowledge, it’s impossible to elaborate on Apple’s aggressive development timeline for the Shortcuts app; if there’s anything I learned in the years spent covering Workflow, however, it’s that members of the Shortcuts team18 have long been chasing their own white whale – democratizing automation and making it accessible for everyone – and they’re unwilling to stop until the goal is in sight. From this standpoint, the technical responsibility that stems from being a built-in app runs in tandem with the ideological responsibility of spreading a message: that Shortcuts is more than an app for nerdy workflows, and Siri can be made more personal and efficient by integrating shortcuts in your daily life.

It’s a tough challenge, but the new Shortcuts is up for it. With a redesign of the action editor, Apple has focused on expressing what actions do through natural language descriptions; the differentiation between Siri shortcuts and custom shortcuts is gone, with all shortcuts now living inside the Shortcuts app; putting together a simple, yet effective shortcut is easier than ever thanks to a redesigned Siri UI and parameters, which provide greater customization of app actions. To ensure that Shortcuts can fit into everyone’s lives, Apple has focused on removing confusion and making shortcut creation more approachable; the results aren’t without flaws, but I believe they’ll move the needle for Shortcuts adoption this year.

Amidst all these changes aimed at facilitating onboarding for newcomers, Apple devoted plenty of attention to power users as well: there are new actions and system integrations; shortcuts can now become part of HomeKit automations, unlocking a whole new layer of control in your home; and with iOS 13.1, you’ll be able to run shortcuts automatically thanks to personal automation and custom triggers.

In a way, the new Shortcuts is a reflection of iOS 13: there’s something for everyone in this release, from new users to experts well-versed in the app’s intricacies. And although it may not define this year’s iOS update like it did in 2018, Shortcuts’ influence ripples throughout iOS and iPadOS 13, particularly for third-party apps. So for the second year in a row, let’s dive in.

The Unification of Shortcuts

With iOS 13, Apple has quashed one of the most confusing aspects of the Shortcuts app and framework from iOS 12: shortcuts donated by apps are no longer different from custom shortcuts, and everything lives in the Shortcuts app now.

In iOS 12, you used to manage custom shortcuts in the Shortcuts app, and Siri shortcuts – single-action commands configured with Siri – in a section of the Settings app. That section has been completely removed in iOS 13: when you add a shortcut from a third-party app to Siri, it ends up in the Shortcuts app’s library; similarly, to discover new app shortcuts suggested by the system, you open the gallery inside the Shortcuts app.

The unified Shortcuts library in iOS 13. The shortcuts with app icons are what used to be called “Siri shortcuts” in iOS 12.

The functional separation between different flavors of shortcuts in iOS 12 was undeniably perplexing; I’m willing to bet it caused more harm than good to users who couldn’t figure out where to find their Siri shortcuts in Settings. Unifying shortcuts under a single roof gives Apple a clear way to market the Shortcuts app – it’s where you discover and create all kinds of shortcuts – and unlocks some fascinating possibilities to get started with automation.

Apple is mitigating the possible issues inherent to the transition from iOS 12 to iOS 13’s Shortcuts app in a handful of ways. When you upgrade from iOS 12 to iOS 13, all your existing Siri shortcuts will be moved from Settings into the Shortcuts app. To alleviate the confusion derived from ending up with, say, 50 new shortcuts in the app at once, all imported shortcuts will be placed at the bottom of the library, so you can easily select and delete them all if you no longer want them.

Shortcuts Sync Between iOS 12 and iOS 13

iOS 13 uses a new file format for shortcuts that is not backwards compatible with iOS 12. This underlying change is invisible unless you only upgrade one of your devices to iOS 13, as is likely the case for users who are leaving their iPads on iOS 12 today.

If you upgrade your iPhone to iOS 13 and leave your iPad running on iOS 12, new shortcuts created on iOS 13 will not sync back to iOS 12. Additionally, if you modify an existing shortcut on iOS 13, the shortcut will sync back to iOS 12, where you will no longer be able to open it.

This is not an ideal situation for users who prefer to install public versions of Apple’s software updates instead of betas. My advice: if you’re planning on leaving your iPad on iOS 12 and upgrade the iPhone to iOS 13, disable iCloud sync for Shortcuts on both devices temporarily, so the two libraries will stay separate and you’ll avoid the risk of shortcut corruption in iOS 12. Alternatively, you could consider installing the public beta of iPadOS 13.1 alongside today’s public release of iOS 13.0, in which case the issue doesn’t apply.

In iOS 12, Siri shortcuts used to live in the Settings app; in iOS 13, everything is stored in the Shortcuts app.

In addition to their placement at the end of the library, Siri shortcuts imported from iOS 12 can be easily spotted by the app icon they carry instead of the monochrome glyphs typically assigned to shortcuts. This design decision doesn’t just apply to imported shortcuts, but extends to all single-action shortcuts you set up in iOS 13: after setting up a shortcut with the new ‘Add to Siri’ UI in iOS 13, or if you create a single app-based shortcut in the Shortcuts app, the resulting shortcut you’ll see in the library will carry the icon of the app that provides the action.

The shortcuts with app icons were imported from iOS 12.

This is a nice way to differentiate between different types of shortcuts in the library: if I scroll and see an app icon, I know that a shortcut is made of a single action offered by an app, and nothing else. If you add any action to an app-based shortcut, the app icon will disappear, leaving you with the default glyph for new shortcuts.

While the library is where you manage all shortcuts now, Apple also had to find a new place for discovering and installing other shortcuts from apps. In keeping with the theme of unifying shortcuts into a single app, the company has chosen the existing Shortcuts gallery to fill this role. The gallery is mostly similar to its iOS 12 counterpart, but iOS 13 adds a new ‘Shortcuts from Your Apps’ section in the middle of the page that lets you browse recently suggested shortcuts as well as all shortcuts from individual apps.

The new gallery in Shortcuts for iOS 13.

The carousel of shortcuts highlighted in this section is the equivalent of iOS 12’s ‘Suggested Shortcuts’ list in Settings. Depending on which apps you have installed or recently used, iOS 13 will suggest a variety of shortcuts that you can configure with the ‘Add to Siri’ UI by tapping on them. To view a list of all the shortcuts available for all apps in the system, you can tap the ‘See All’ button and the gallery will take you to a list that contains every app’s recently suggested shortcuts.

Shortcut suggestions live in the Shortcuts app’s gallery in iOS 13.

There’s another important distinction with iOS 12 worth noting here: the ‘Shortcuts from Your Apps’ section replaces shortcut discovery from the Settings app, but it doesn’t offer all the functionalities you could find in Settings last year. What the gallery provides in iOS 13 is a list of suggested shortcuts; they’re not all the shortcuts that an app donated to the system – just the ones Siri thinks you may want to configure right now. Apple’s answer to see all available shortcuts for an app? Create a new empty shortcut in the library, select the app you want in the ‘Apps’ category, and there you’ll see all the shortcuts an app supports. Alternatively, third-party apps could implement their own views to show users all the shortcuts they can install, but that’s up to developers to build (PCalc does this). By default, the gallery is where you discover suggested shortcuts, and the library is where you create and manage everything else.

In iOS 13, you can use the ‘Apps’ category of the action library to view all shortcuts for all apps.

Suggested Automations

The gallery will gain a new section in iOS 13.1: suggested automations. Described as containing shortcuts that “help streamline your day”, this section was originally advertised as a way for Shortcuts to learn from you and suggest automations based on your habits and favorite apps.

At the moment of publishing this, the section – at least for me – only contains a single ‘Going Home’ automation that automates listening to music and getting directions when Shortcuts predicts I’m about to drive home. I’m keen to see how intelligent this section will turn out over time.

The decision to only display a subset of app shortcuts in the gallery may seem counterintuitive at first, but think about Apple’s end goal: with the unification of shortcuts, the company wants to provide users with a path from simple to more complex automation – from basic shortcuts, which are always useful, to more personalized automations. By removing Siri shortcuts from Settings, Apple is pushing users towards the gallery, where they’ll be exposed to hundreds of custom shortcuts they weren’t familiar with before; and by using the library to view all shortcuts offered by an app, they’re incentivizing the creation of shortcuts. Apple hopes the gallery will be enough to satiate your shortcut needs with suggestions and curated picks; but once you reach the point where you want to add more shortcuts for your favorite apps, the company would like you to start building your first shortcut right there in the library, where you’ll discover all the other actions Shortcuts offers.

With the unification of shortcuts, Apple wants to provide users with a path from simple to more complex automation.

It’s a risky onboarding strategy, but it makes sense on paper, and I like the subtlety of it. After all, there’s only so much promotion you can do to push adoption of the Shortcuts app before you effectively force users to check it out, which is what Apple is doing by making Shortcuts a system app and directing users to the gallery. I don’t have the aggregate numbers to speculate on iOS 12’s reliance on Settings for shortcut management, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that few users ever bothered to navigate into Settings ⇾ Siri & Search to find shortcuts. I feel like this year’s move is the right one.

There’s another advantage to merging app shortcuts and custom shortcuts into a single experience: it blurs the lines between shortcuts run from Siri and those that execute within the Shortcuts app, because all shortcuts are now actions with an editor and configurable parameters. And all of this begins with the ‘Add to Siri’ UI, which is extending parts of the Shortcuts editor across the entire system.

Add to Siri

The underlying premise of the ‘Add to Siri’ screen hasn’t changed from iOS 12: when you come across an app action you’d like to invoke again in the future, you can add it to Siri and give it a custom activation phrase. How you do this, and the interaction with the ‘Add to Siri’ UI, however, is entirely different in iOS 13.

In iOS 13, the ‘Add to Siri’ screen has a new design that more clearly represents cause and effect: at the top, you have your voice trigger, labeled ‘When I say’, which is followed by the action, simply indicated as ‘Do’. The design of this screen couldn’t be more obvious; it reminds me of IFTTT in how it depicts the relationship between trigger and action.

The new ‘Add to Siri’ UI.

When adding a shortcut to Siri in iOS 13, you no longer need to speak a phrase: you can just type it out with the keyboard. This is a fantastic change that has singlehandedly doubled my usage of app shortcuts via Siri: so many times over the past year I found myself postponing, and eventually forgetting about, the creation of a shortcut because I couldn’t record a phrase in that moment. With the ability to type custom phrases, I can customize my Siri experience in silence, without disturbing those around me. More importantly, because you don’t need to speak a phrase to Siri anymore, the system will not mishear your custom invocation phrase, which means you won’t have to confirm the phrase with a secondary step or accept suggestions for alternate spellings.

No more need to record a phrase by speaking to Siri.

The most consequential change to the ‘Add to Siri’ screen in iOS 13, however, lies in the ‘Do’ section, where you can configure how a shortcut behaves when activated from Siri. This screen encapsulates two notable improvements to the Shortcuts framework in iOS 13, and it offers an indication of why Apple decided to go all-in with the Shortcuts app this year.

In iOS 12, adding a shortcut to Siri was a one-way street: after finding an app action you wanted to integrate with Siri, all you could do was record the phrase and save it. The action was a pre-packaged item that couldn’t be customized by the user; if you wanted to modify the behavior of a Siri shortcut, you either had to find a different one, or create a new one from scratch in the Shortcuts app.

Enter parameters in iOS 13. As I’ll detail in the next section, apps that provide shortcuts in iOS 13 can do so with support for dynamic parameters, which alter the behavior of an action and allow you to “have a conversation” with an app. A conversion utility, for instance, may have a parameter for the type of unit you want to convert, so you’ll be able to choose between, say, centimeters and feet when the shortcut runs; or a water-logging app may ask if you want to log one or two glasses of water using a parameter. Because shortcuts can support this new level of personalization in iOS 13, Apple had to revise the design of the ‘Add to Siri’ screen accordingly. If an app’s shortcut supports parameters, you’ll be able to tap the ‘Do’ button to reveal a Shortcuts mini-editor, where you’ll have a chance to customize the shortcut’s functionality before adding it to Siri.

You can customize a shortcut before adding it to Siri.

In the example above, you can see a shortcut for PCalc, which is fully embracing shortcut parameters in its iOS 13 update. The action itself carries the same design as any other action in the Shortcuts app, but was presented from the ‘Add to Siri’ screen. Before saving the shortcut to Siri with a phrase, you can configure parameters in the form of tappable blue tokens in the action’s natural language description, or as toggles revealed by tapping ‘Show More’. iOS 13 allows developers to pre-populate a parameter list with options the user can choose from when configuring the shortcut: for PCalc, you can tap on the ‘X’ parameter to choose between registers, memory, or clipboard; you can tap the currency to bring up a list of other currency parameters, and the list can even be searched if there are several parameters to pick from. The UI to do all this is consistent with the Shortcuts app; you can even disregard picking a specific parameter and enter ‘Ask Each Time’ instead, which will make the shortcut conversational when run via Siri in iOS 13.1.

WaterMinder is another great example of dynamic shortcuts with parameters in iOS 13. From the ‘Add to Siri’ UI, you can pick a parameter for the type of drink you want to log, then reveal more options to enter a custom amount. The interface employed by the system to do this is exactly that of the Shortcuts app, down to the custom keyboard row with buttons for variables – except it can be brought up across the system by any iOS app with the ‘Add to Siri’ screen.

Tap the ‘Water’ parameter to change the drink type before saving a shortcut to Siri.

The ‘Add to Siri’ UI has effectively become an extension of the Shortcuts app in iOS 13. Apps can provide shortcuts that are configurable with the same parameters and controls available in the Shortcuts app; shortcuts can be assigned a phrase by typing, and that phrase becomes their name in the Shortcuts app.19 What used to be two separate systems in iOS 12’s ‘Add to Siri’ flow is now part of the all-encompassing Shortcuts app in iOS 13, which creates a tighter bond between Siri and Shortcuts. The fact that your “simple shortcuts” are saved in the Shortcuts app, where you can further customize them with the full shortcut editor by adding new actions to them, tells you quite a lot about Apple’s new Shortcuts strategy.

Thanks to parameters and the built-in nature of the Shortcuts app in iOS 13, the Shortcuts editor has turned into a feature available for all apps that support adding shortcuts to Siri. Thus, ‘Add to Siri’ is more than a screen to record custom phrases: it’s a vector to bring people into the Shortcuts app and its more advanced, personalized automation. The engine to get there? Conversational shortcuts powered by parameters.

Parameters and Conversational Shortcuts

When Apple relaunched Workflow as Shortcuts last year and integrated it with Siri, it was clear that both the Shortcuts app and developer framework were first steps toward a modern “scripting language” capable of communicating with apps and letting users interact with Siri directly. The first version of Shortcuts was still limited to URL scheme-based third-party app actions, and it didn’t support user interactions within Siri’s voice context, but Apple’s trajectory was clear.

As I wrote last year, on user interactions inside Siri:

This is perhaps the most notably absent feature from Shortcuts today: to run entirely within Siri, your custom shortcuts have to omit all kinds of user interactions. Siri already features the ability to let users confirm requests, offer additional information, or choose one among multiple items in a list; shortcuts running inside Siri should provide the same options.

And earlier this year, on third-party app integrations:

What I’m imagining is something simpler, yet exponentially more difficult for Apple to build: I want Shortcuts to integrate with third-party apps just like it can request native access to Reminders, Calendar, Apple Music, HealthKit, and other Apple apps. For Shortcuts to take its integration with the iOS app ecosystem to the next level, developers have to be able to provide actions based on a secure API that replicates the kind of direct integration Apple frameworks have with Shortcuts.

In iOS 13, Apple has delivered on both aspects of the Shortcuts experience: apps can eschew URL schemes (which Apple called “inherently insecure” at WWDC in discouraging new custom uses of them) and offer shortcuts that support inputs and outputs via parameters in what effectively amounts to a Shortcuts API20; and shortcuts are fully conversational now, meaning that besides having apps “talk” to each other by exchanging data via actions, shortcuts that require user interactions can run entirely within the Siri voice context without having to launch the Shortcuts app.

This initiative represents a shift from the old type of automation that Workflow spearheaded in the days of x-callback-url but, more broadly, it confirms Apple’s plans for extending Siri, which were only partly hinted last year: with conversational shortcuts, third-party app actions can become first-class features of the Shortcuts app and Siri, as if they were native functionalities of both.

Parameters are the Shortcuts API I’ve long argued Apple needed to move past URL schemes: they are variables that can pass dynamic input to an app through a shortcut; the app can perform the selected action in the background (without launching), and, unlike in iOS 12, pass back results to the Shortcuts app or Siri. With parameters, app shortcuts are no longer fixed actions: they can be customized by the user to perform different commands, allowing for greater flexibility than iOS 12’s Siri shortcuts and a more secure model than Shortcuts’ old x-callback-URL actions.

Parameters allow you to visually customize an action with common iOS interface elements.

Parameters take different shapes and forms in a shortcut. At a high level, they are editable fields inside an app’s action that let you customize what a shortcut does by passing specific input to it; they look like blue empty fields, which you can select to pick from a list of pre-populated values, type some text, or enter a magic variable. When a shortcut runs, it’ll pick up the parameters you’ve filled out and perform the associated action accordingly.

Parameters let you treat actions as modular components where each piece can be customized to your needs – provided developers build support for them in their iOS 13 apps. There are different flavors of parameters: in addition to the aforementioned blue tokens, a shortcut can include on/off switches to configure specific options; there’s support for segmented controls; developers can even build shortcuts with additional parameters that accept variables of specific types (such as Text or URLs) as well as files. When a shortcut runs, it “resolves” all of these elements, performs the action without leaving the Shortcuts app or Siri (depending on where you’re running it), and returns results inline.

At first glance, shortcuts with parameters resemble the old “visual actions” that the Shortcuts team used to build for apps based on x-callback-URL to make them prettier and hide URL schemes, such as Things or Bear – and that’s the point. Like those actions, parameters allow you to visually customize an action with common iOS interface elements such as text fields and toggles, all while integrating with Shortcuts’ magic variable system. Here, let’s take a look at an actual example from Things, which had a custom integration with Shortcuts in iOS 12 via URL schemes and now supports iOS 13 parameters:

Before and after parameters.

While Shortcuts’ old third-party actions were an interaction facade and ultimately relied on launching URL schemes to invoke actions inside apps, shortcuts with parameters are executed entirely within Shortcuts or Siri; they come with their own permission system to request access to an app’s data; and, unlike URL schemes, they can return rich results such as files, dictionaries, and even custom magic variables. And most importantly: any developer can create them now.21

Passing Input Parameters

As per tradition in my Shortcuts coverage, let’s use some actual examples to demonstrate these features. Scriptable, Simon Støvring’s JavaScript IDE for iOS, now offers a ‘Run Script’ shortcut that can be customized with parameters. You can tap the ‘Script’ parameter to choose from a pre-populated list of your scripts. The list can be searched (a new option for all lists in iOS 13) so you can choose a script to run whenever the shortcut executes; however, you can also leave the ‘Ask Each Time’ parameter in there, in which case Shortcuts or Siri will ask you to pick which Scriptable script to run every time you invoke the shortcut.

Note that the list of scripts is generated at runtime by the shortcut, which communicates directly with Scriptable in the background to assemble a list of all your scripts currently in the app.

A shortcut can support multiple parameters at once, and Scriptable takes advantage of this to great effect in letting you pass multiple data objects to a script. You can run a script with a primary input parameter, but you can also assign individual parameters for text, URL, image, and file inputs. Plus, there’s a switch to determine whether the script should run in the app (launch Scriptable) or in the background.

Multiple parameters (indicated by arrows) can fill out an action at runtime.

In iOS 12, if you wanted to invoke a Scriptable script and pass data to it, you either had to launch it via a URL scheme, write one piece of data at a time to the system clipboard, or run a script from the share sheet. You couldn’t pass multiple rich objects at once from Siri or the Shortcuts app. Parameters in Scriptable unlock new automation possibilities that go far beyond the clipboard and URL schemes; for instance, I’ve been using Scriptable with parameters to add features to Shortcuts that Apple didn’t build, such as a way to check whether or not a device is currently in landscape or using dark mode.

Checking with a Scriptable shortcut whether dark mode is enabled or not. The result is passed back by Scriptable as a text variable. The Scriptable app never launches.

James Thomson’s PCalc, one of the apps that pioneered the idea of clipboard workarounds for Siri shortcuts in iOS 12, has fully embraced parameters in iOS 13 to let you perform calculations, pass input numbers, and retrieve results entirely inside Shortcuts and Siri. PCalc’s is among the most technically impressive implementations of parameters I’ve seen so far; like Scriptable, it has allowed me to enrich Shortcuts with native functionalities not created by Apple.

PCalc’s shortcuts for iOS 13, featuring parameters.

As in iOS 12, PCalc offers a variety of shortcuts to perform conversions, set register values, run commands and functions, and more. In iOS 13, these shortcuts support parameters so you can customize them from inside PCalc (with the ‘Add to Siri’ UI) or in the Shortcuts app. My favorite is the ‘Convert Value’ one, which supports parameters to set the numeric value to convert, pick a category of conversions, and choose two units. Impressively, the list of parameters for units updates dynamically depending on the category parameter you set: if you pick ‘Currency’, you’ll see a list of currency symbols; select ‘Length’, and you’ll find units such as ‘Centimeters’ and ‘Inches’ instead.

Converting between currencies with PCalc inside the Shortcuts app.

Of course, all of these parameters can be picked at runtime (when a shortcut runs) by inserting ‘Ask Each Time’ in their field. There’s even a switch to determine whether the shortcut should update currency rates with an Internet connection when it runs – which is what you want to get an accurate conversion between currencies. Because the first parameter supports plain text user input, any variable can be put in there: you can type a number and convert it every time the shortcut runs; or if you want to make it more dynamic, you can use the numeric result of another action such as ‘Ask for Input’, which will let you enter a value with a large number pad when the shortcut runs. And as we’ll see in a bit, actions such as ‘Ask for Input’ are fully integrated with Siri’s conversational abilities, so they’ll automatically translate to voice input when you run them through the voice assistant.

Secure ShellFish, Anders Borum’s excellent SFTP client that integrates with Files, is also adopting parameters with actions to upload files to a server, list the contents of a directory on a server, download files, and more. The ‘Upload File’ shortcut, for instance, lets you pass a file generated from Shortcuts as a parameter, supports picking one of your existing servers with a list, and has a switch to overwrite a file on the server if it already exists.

Secure ShellFish’s shortcuts in iOS 13. Thanks to parameters, the app can now upload any magic variable as a file to a remote server.

I’ve long wished Apple would add native FTP actions to Shortcuts; with the parameter-based actions provided by Secure ShellFish, I can stop waiting for Apple because Borum’s app does exactly what I need and runs inside Shortcuts, where it can be integrated with other apps or Apple’s own actions.

Parameter-based actions are Apple’s Trojan horse to bring more native functionalities into Shortcuts through third-party apps.

In case it’s not clear yet, parameter-based actions are Apple’s Trojan horse to bring more native functionalities into Shortcuts through third-party apps. Another great example of this is Esse, a utility to transform text into different formats. In iOS 12, Esse forced you to set up individual Siri shortcuts for each text transformation type, which was cumbersome and annoying, and it could only read text previously copied to the system clipboard.

The Esse shortcut we use to capitalize headlines for MacStories (left) and Esse’s list of supported text functions.

In iOS 13, the app now offers a single ‘Transform Text’ shortcut with parameters to pick a transformation type and pass a text string to transform. As a result, Esse’s action is now better than Shortcuts’ own ‘Change Case’ one: it’s just as integrated with other variables in a shortcut, it returns a plain text variable as a result, but it supports more transformation types than Shortcuts. At MacStories, for instance, we can now use Esse’s shortcuts to capitalize titles for our posts using the Chicago Manual of Style guidelines, which aren’t supported by Apple.

Action Outputs

The integration between Shortcuts and third-party apps via parameters isn’t a one-way communication channel: in addition to passing input to apps via parameters, Shortcuts can receive results from apps in a variety of formats. Again, I have some practical examples to share that should give you an idea of what’s possible.

CARROT Weather has been updated for iOS 13 with a ‘Get Weather Report’ shortcut that lets you query the app’s forecast system to return current observations, hourly forecasts, or a daily forecast to the Shortcuts app – all without having to open CARROT or pass clipboard data via Siri shortcuts. By default, the shortcut uses your current location to check the weather, but you can also type an address in the ‘Choose Location’ parameter window or, even better, hook up the location parameter with a location variable returned by another action; you can, for example, get the address of a calendar event and pass that as a location parameter to the CARROT Weather shortcut.

This is all it takes to get the weather forecast from CARROT Weather for an upcoming event in iOS 13.

To pick a magic variable for a parameter that doesn’t support inline variable input, long-press the parameter field and you’ll be presented with a standard magic variable picker.

When the CARROT shortcut runs with the ‘Current Observations’ parameter set, it returns current weather conditions as a plain text string. Select a forecast mode, however, and the shortcut will return a list of results, which is compatible with Shortcuts’ ‘Choose from List’ action to present multiple items at once.

A list of forecasts returned by CARROT Weather within Shortcuts.

Thanks to the Content Graph engine, outputs returned by third-party actions can often be previewed and processed in Shortcuts with no further conversion necessary. Secure ShellFish, for example, has a shortcut to list the contents of a directory on a remote server: the result is a collection of file paths that you can swipe through using Shortcuts’ Quick Look, or which you can combine with Apple’s ‘Combine Text’ action. Secure ShellFish can also download files from a server: in that case, the result will be a ‘File’ variable, which is natively supported by Shortcuts and can be previewed with Quick Look, passed to the share sheet, or sent elsewhere.

An image file returned by a ShellFish action inline within a shortcut.

Toolbox Pro, a utility (currently in beta) that aims to complement Shortcuts with additional features through native shortcuts, comes with an action that lets you create images programmatically and use them in other actions. For instance, here’s an image (the red square) that was created inside Shortcuts with a third-party action, on which I overlaid an icon fetched from iCloud Drive:

The background image was created with an action by configuring some parameters.

Shortcuts’ magic variable functionality comes full circle in iOS 13 with the ability for third-party actions to return their own custom magic variables for a shortcut to use. Take Greg Pierce’s Drafts as an example: in iOS 13, Drafts offers a shortcut to query the contents of an entire workspace and get all the notes contained inside it. The object returned by this action is a custom magic variable called ‘Drafts Details’, which can be expanded to specify which part of a draft you want to parse, such as its title, body text, creation date, and more. I’ve been using this action to compile my ‘iOS Review’ workspace to a single .md text file that I backed up to multiple locations earlier this year; I’ve never had a better backup system for my articles. I’d like all text editors to support similar shortcuts now.

A custom magic variable to inspect content from Drafts.

Custom Error Messages

Also new in iOS 13, third-party shortcuts can return custom error messages that are more informative than “There’s been an unexpected problem with the host app”. I particularly appreciate these messages when running Scriptable scripts from Shortcuts: if something’s gone wrong in a script, I’ll get the exact error message generated from JavaScript, but inside the Shortcuts app.

Yep, I can.

The freedom afforded by the ability to parse application data as custom objects in Shortcuts is unlike anything we’ve seen before in iOS automation: we have reached the point where, in just a few taps, we can request secure access to an app’s data, program actions in a visual environment, and work with rich responses that can be connected to other apps’ actions. By definition, this is an application programming interface, but it’s exposed without writing a single line of code, and it’s fully integrated with Siri on multiple Apple devices.

Which brings me to the next major feature unlocked by parameters…

Conversational Shortcuts and Siri Interactions

Conversational shortcuts, originally announced by Apple at WWDC, are among the features that have been postponed to iOS 13.1. I’m including them in my coverage today because they help us understand Apple’s strategy with dynamic parameters and third-party shortcuts, but they’re not part of iOS 13.0, and you’ll have to wait a while longer to take advantage of them.

A conversational shortcut is a shortcut you can interact with while using Siri and your voice. As I mentioned above, one of the drawbacks of iOS 12’s shortcuts framework was the lack of any kind of user interaction with shortcuts running inside Siri: if a shortcut required you to enter some text or pick an option from a list, it would launch the Shortcuts app instead of completing the task within Siri.

All of this is changing in iOS 13.1: if Siri hits a parameter that requires an interaction to be resolved, it’ll ask for your input before continuing with the execution of the shortcut. At a high level, this typically involves speaking a response or choosing from a list of options; both Shortcuts’ native actions and third-party actions will support conversational mode, which has been designed to allow for interactions on any Siri-capable device that can run shortcuts, including HomePod and Apple Watch.

On Apple’s side, shortcuts have been made conversational by bridging actions that require user interaction to Siri’s voice environment. When a custom shortcut running inside Siri encounters one of the following actions…

Choose from List

Choose from Menu

Ask for Input

Dictate Text

…the actions will automatically transform into Siri interactions thanks to conversational mode. Here’s what a ‘Choose from List’ action looks like when running within Siri:

Here’s a menu:

And here are requests for text input:

While this kind of Siri integration with certain actions is precisely what I imagined last year, what I didn’t foresee at the time was how Apple could leverage Siri’s linguistic abilities to make shortcuts truly conversational and well-suited for human interactions.

Actions aren’t just bridged to Siri so you can speak the name of an option or tap the screen to select a menu item: they fully support natural language input, allowing you to interact with Siri without following a specific script. For instance, when a list of multiple options comes up, you don’t have to say the exact name of an item to choose it: you can just say things like “the first one” or “pick the third option”, and Siri will know what you mean. All of Siri’s natural language capabilities for list-picking, punctuation, and text input can be tapped into when interacting with a conversational shortcut. As a result, not only are your shortcuts more useful because you can use them anywhere, but they’re optimized for voice interactions as well, so you can have a conversation with a shortcut as you normally would with Siri.

An example of a conversational shortcut in Siri. You can go back and forth with the assistant using natural language input.

Conversational shortcuts aren’t limited to a handful of Apple actions: all third-party actions based on parameters can be used in conversational mode in Siri with iOS 13.1. When actions with parameters are invoked within Siri, they behave as they would in UI form in the Shortcuts app, with the addition of custom voice responses. If a parameter was left empty or has an ‘Ask Each Time’ value, Siri will bring up a list of dynamic options to choose from, which you can then confirm using natural language input. If an action has multiple parameters that require user input, Siri will move through them sequentially, requesting that you fill them out one by one at runtime before executing a shortcut and returning a visual or vocal response (or both).

Let’s go back to the Esse shortcut I mentioned above. If both the ‘Text’ and ‘Function’ parameters are left empty and the shortcut is invoked in Siri, it will not error out, nor will it launch the Shortcuts app: in iOS 13.1, Siri will first ask you to pick a transformation to run, then it’ll let you dictate some text to transform.

LookUp, my favorite dictionary app, is getting a major update for iOS 13 with new shortcuts based on parameters. One of these actions lets you look up the meaning of a word: if the definition parameter is left empty and the shortcut is run from Siri, you’ll be able to choose a definition type from the assistant, which will then return a printed response along with a visual snippet powered by the LookUp interface.

As you can see from the screenshots above, there’s some work developers need to do to optimize their dynamic shortcuts for iOS 13. When Siri reaches a parameter that requires user input, it can ask you a descriptive question, but that question (“What word are you searching for?” in the example above) has to be programmed by the app’s developer beforehand. Furthermore, in iOS 13 developers can provide pronunciation hints for letting Siri understand less verbose options, such as “veggie” instead of “vegetarian”; these dictionaries of synonyms also have to be created by developers first, as it’s not something that the system does for them.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that conversational mode gives Shortcuts an entirely new dimension, making the app – and thus Siri – drastically more convenient on a daily basis.

While Shortcuts’ integration with Siri in iOS 12 was useful, it was limited to fixed actions without interactivity, which hindered Siri’s ability to perform personalized tasks on demand throughout the day. iOS 13.1 and conversational mode fulfill Apple’s vision for Shortcuts and Siri: every action, no matter whether it’s made by Apple or not, can now run in a voice-only mode on any compatible device, providing you with new ways to use your favorite apps and run your custom shortcuts wherever you are, whenever you want.

Conversational mode gives Shortcuts an entirely new dimension in iOS 13.1.

Conversational mode sums up Apple’s advantage over its competition: in a world where digital assistants are made more versatile by pushing your personal data through web-based integrations and cloud services, Apple is extending Shortcuts and Siri using a clear privacy model based on the App Store, on-device requests, and native app actions. If developers adopt actions with dynamic parameters in their apps, they won’t just offer better automation features for Shortcuts: they will effectively become new features for Siri – a unique blend of automation and services that only Apple can deliver to users today.

New Editor

The addition of parameters to shortcuts in iOS 13 isn’t just a new developer technology for third-party apps: because of parameters, Apple has updated nearly all of its built-in actions to support them, and in the process shipped a reimagined Shortcuts editor that changes some fundamental aspects of building shortcuts.

At first glance, the new Shortcuts action editor may look similar to its predecessor, with the addition of new colors and bolder descriptions. In reality, the editor has been entirely redesigned around parameters, following two key principles: the editor focuses less on managing the vertical data flow between actions, and more on performing operations with individual actions; and, each action is presented with a more expressive, natural language label that describes its purpose with a sentence. This is a profound rethinking of how shortcuts are made: five years after the original launch of Workflow, Apple is introducing an editor UI that is neither Workflow nor Automator, but something completely new, heavily influenced by parameters and magic variables.

With the new Shortcuts editor, you’ll be using fewer actions to achieve the same results.

Apple’s first order of business was to move away from the traditional approach of building automations by having to manage variables as they flow top to bottom across actions. The Workflow team had started doing the same, to a certain extent, with magic variables back in 2017, and Shortcuts in iOS 13 completes that mission: the ‘Get Variable’ action has been removed from Shortcuts, and every action now has a parameter field where you can put a magic variable inside. The results are major code savings – shortcuts will be shorter because they’ll require fewer actions to perform the same function – and a more readable editor, with some caveats.

If you’re a longtime Workflow user, it’s likely going to take a while to wrap your head around the changes to the editor, so allow me to explain. In Workflow and iOS 12’s version of Shortcuts, you usually had to make sure you were “passing” the right variable to a series of actions; you would do this by “getting” the variable and connecting it to a subsequent action. In iOS 13, you need to let go of the concept of getting variables and passing them to the next block of actions. Thanks to parameter fields, magic variables can always be inserted inline within an action, removing the need to “pass them” through a dedicated step.

Let’s go over some examples. In iOS 12’s Shortcuts app, if you wanted to format the current date, you first had to get the date, then connect it to a ‘Format Date’ action. In iOS 13, the Date portion of the ‘Format Date’ action is a parameter; this means you can put the ‘Current Date’ variable (which is always available as a default variable) directly into ‘Format Date’, thus removing one action from the shortcut.

Playing a specific playlist from your Apple Music library used to follow similar rules. In iOS 12, you first had to get the playlist, then use ‘Play Music’ to start playback for the variable passed to the action. With the new Shortcuts app, the ‘Play Music’ action has a parameter (the Music portion of it) that lets you pick any item from your Music library without going through ‘Get Playlist’ first. Again, the result is one less action and a more readable, expressive action that displays its purpose in plain English.

Parameters have also been added to If blocks (which have received a major upgrade in iOS 13 – more on this below) as well as Repeat loops. While in iOS 12 you always had to make sure the correct variable was being passed to a loop, in iOS 13 the repeat loop iterates on the variable you specify in its own parameter field.

The same shortcut in iOS 12 (left) and iOS 13. The new version is more compact thanks to parameters inside actions.

The code savings granted by the adoption of parameters in the new action editor are more apparent when dealing with long shortcuts that involve multiple conditional blocks and management of different variables. Conditional blocks have been vastly enhanced in iOS 13: while in iOS 12 they were limited to four fixed conditions (Equals, Contains, Is Greater Than, Is Less Than), Shortcuts in iOS 13 brings If blocks that have more conditions, and which are also dynamic depending on the variable they’re processing. Conditional blocks in iOS 13 support negative conditions (Is Not, Does Not Contain), can check for the beginning and end of a text string (Begins With, Ends With), and have more mathematical operators (Is Greater Than or Equal To, Is Less Than or Equal To, Is Between).

New conditions in iOS 13.

More importantly, conditional blocks can now check for the existence of a variable with the Has Any Value and Does Not Have Any Value conditions; in iOS 12, if you wanted to check whether or not a variable had any data, you had to do the dance of Get Variable-Count Items-If, and Get Variable again to process the data. Those were four actions that can now be cut to one action: in iOS 13, you can simply put a variable in the If action’s parameter field and check if it has any data with Has Any Value – that’s it.

Checking for the existence of variables is much easier in iOS 13.

Additionally, conditional blocks are dynamic: their available conditions change whether the parameter is some text, a number, a date, or another type of variable. This dynamic interpretation of the parameter type inside a conditional block is a terrific improvement over iOS 12’s limited, clunky conditional blocks.

New conditions for numbers and dates.

HomeKit Conditions

In another major twist for conditional blocks, Apple has added a new default magic variable that can be picked for conditional blocks in addition to clipboard and dates: home accessories.

Conditions and parameters specific to HomeKit devices.

In iOS 13, as I’ll explain later, Shortcuts offers full integration with the Home app to let you enable scenes and control the individual characteristics of devices from the shortcut editor. The same Home UI that is available for dedicated Home actions is also present as a default magic variable that can be added to conditional blocks to check for the state of an accessory. My understanding is that Apple assumed a lot of users are going to build shortcuts to perform actions depending on what’s going on around the house, and they wanted to make it easy by embedding home accessory state into conditional blocks.

It’s a fantastic idea: with a few taps using the same interface available in the Home app, you can select any HomeKit accessory (including TVs) and check the state of any available characteristic with the conditional operators available in the If action. Due to varying HomeKit implementations between manufacturers, some accessories might report state with descriptive adjectives such as ‘Open’ or ‘Closed’ (the Eve Door contact sensor) or numbers like 0 and 1. The amount of device characteristics you can access from Shortcuts’ conditional block is ridiculously huge: you can get the brightness, hue, saturation, and power state of lights; you can read the air quality and PM2.5 density from an air purifier; if you have weather sensors, you can get a variety of data points such as temperature, relative humidity, and so forth. The list goes on.

Home automation plays a big role in Shortcuts’ update this year. It was a smart decision of Apple to simplify creating actions for accessory conditions with a default magic variable integrated with the Home app: it makes creating custom HomeKit shortcuts an effortless affair.

With all this in mind, let’s look at a shortcut that presents a list of locations fetched from upcoming calendar events. In iOS 12, due to the less flexible conditional blocks and multiple ‘Get Variable’ actions, the shortcut is comprised of 15 actions; in iOS 13, I was able to cut the same shortcut down to 9 actions – a 40% decrease made possible by parameters and more powerful conditional blocks.

The iOS 13 version of this shortcut (right) is denser and more readable at the same time thanks to expressive actions.

Calendar Locations

Get a list of upcoming calendar events that contain locations.

Get the shortcut here.

By now, you should hopefully have an idea of what switching from passing variables between actions to using parameters means for creating shortcuts. There’s more to the new editor than just how you input variables with parameters though.

First, the editor’s window has been updated: buttons to run and share a shortcut are now at the bottom of the screen so they’re easier to reach with your thumb on an iPhone; the shortcut’s name is displayed as a large title at the top, where you’ll also find a new button to open shortcut-specific settings.

Settings have undergone some reorganization: in addition to using a padded table view style in iOS 13, the screen (now called ‘Details’) no longer features an ‘Add to Siri’ button because all shortcuts can be invoked in Siri by their name now. Furthermore, to customize the color and glyph of a shortcut, you have to tap on its icon. The ‘Details’ screen also hosts the new privacy-related controls for access to apps and services, which are scoped on a per-shortcut basis.

Shortcut settings.

Second, the action library (the panel that slides up from the bottom on iPhone – a sidebar on iPad) now always comes up displaying a grid of categories, which are bolder and easier to tap, plus suggestions based on shortcuts donated by apps and tracked by the system. Top suggestions are broken down by frequently used apps, followed by a list of everything else. Suggestions are always based on a specific type of action: you’ll see contact shortcuts for the ‘Send Message’ shortcuts and playlists for the ‘Play Music’ action. You can either add the suggestion with the pre-filled information into the shortcut, or add the vanilla action by tapping the ‘i’ button next to its header.

In iOS 13, Shortcuts surfaces suggestions for app actions with specific parameters already filled in.

Suggestions never clicked for me in iOS 12: browsing them required too many taps and they weren’t contextually suggested based on specific actions I’d performed inside an app. The suggestion-based system is much improved in iOS 13, and I found myself often accepting a suggestion and adding it to a shortcut because it was indeed an action I’d frequently performed before. I believe this feature has the potential to help newcomers overcome the intimidating nature of a new empty shortcut: speeding up actions you perform on a regular basis is exactly what automation should be all about.

Seemingly in an effort to simplify shortcut creation, Apple has reduced the number of categories in the library from 12 to 6; in addition, when viewing the list of actions available for a specific category, each action’s description field is now hidden by default.

Wouldn’t it be better to always show descriptions for actions?

I’m not sure why the description field needed to be hidden (if anything, it made browsing actions easier…?), but I understand the motivation behind the streamlined category grid. In iOS 13, Apple has rolled actions from the Calendar, Contacts, Health, Home, Music, and Photos categories into an improved Apps category, which now displays native shortcuts for all apps (both Apple-made and third-party ones) installed on your device.

The Apps category is all grown-up in iOS 13.

The new Apps category is my favorite change to the action library in iOS 13: for the first time, Shortcuts provides a unified, one-stop destination for all app-related actions. It only makes sense to integrate actions such as Photos and Health – which most people associate with the respective apps on their devices – with a section labeled ‘Apps’. As a result of suggestions and the redesigned Apps category, I’m finding actions more quickly, searching a bit less, and overall enjoying the shortcut creation process more. With Shortcuts becoming a built-in app in iOS 13, I think shipping a redesigned, friendlier library was a good idea, and I have a feeling it’ll be successful.

Library Colors and Context Menus

Although the structure of the Shortcuts library is unchanged from iOS 12, there’s one aspect I’m not a fan of: Shortcuts in iOS 13 uses dull, washed-out colors in lieu of iOS 12’s vibrant, fun colors for your shortcuts.

Those colors used to be fun.

The theory goes, Apple had to tweak these colors to achieve a more pleasing visual effect for dark mode. I don’t buy it though: let alone the fact that colors could have been changed for dark mode only, I believe the company could have struck a better balance between Shortcuts’ old colors and this new pastel appearance without overshooting this much. Shortcuts’ colors in iOS 12 were fun and easier to identify; the new ones are just boring.

iOS and iPadOS 13.1 add a new ‘Details’ button to this context menu.

In better news, you can now press on shortcuts in the library to show a context menu with a preview of the shortcut and some actions. In iOS 13.1, you’ll also be able to jump to a shortcut’s ‘Details’ screen directly from the context menu.

The third major change of the editor involves how variables are assigned to parameters and the visual design of both. When you drop an action into the editor, Shortcuts now automatically gives it a parameter based on the preceding action. For instance, if you have a ‘Select Photos’ action and drop ‘Repeat with Each’ after it, a ‘Photos’ variable will be placed in the ‘Items’ parameter field of the Repeat loop – no need to manually assign it. Shortcuts performs this automatic parameter assignment every time you drop a new action or rearrange existing actions – assuming an action you’re re-arranging doesn’t already have a parameter you manually assigned to it first.

Automatic parameter assignment.

This was clearly meant to speed up and simplify the shortcut creation process, which, as you can see, is a recurring theme in Shortcuts this year. I think it’s a good idea: in my tests, Shortcuts correctly identified parameters for actions I dropped in the editor most of the time, sparing me the trouble of having to pick a magic variable by hand. For those times when Shortcuts puts the wrong variable in a parameter field, or if you just want to use a different one, you can still tap a variable to inspect its details and clear it, as in iOS 12.

You can still inspect variables by tapping them. If a parameter field supports text input, you can tap the keyboard icon (above the QuickType keyboard, top left) to enter text or other variables.

From a visual standpoint, the big difference between the Shortcuts editor in iOS 12 and 13 is the expressive, natural language design adopted by Apple this year, which often eschews segmented controls, separate text fields, and toggles in favor of a “sentence-like” structure where fields are tappable parameters. Actions tend to be more compact in iOS 13 because of this approach, but Apple is also more aggressively hiding advanced action fields behind a ‘Show More’ button. Compare the following Reminders and Calendar actions between iOS 12 and iOS 13 for example:

The effects of a natural language-based design on actions.

These two actions serve as a perfect summary of the differences between the old Automator-inspired editor and the new natural language, parameter-based one in iOS 13. In the old Shortcuts app, actions exposed each field with a label and used various interface elements for different types of variables. To me, that felt like a design rooted in the tradition of macOS automation with menus influenced by Automator, designed by programmers for programmers who also wanted to carefully control every field and variable. I loved it, but I’m not surprised Apple got rid of it.

Apple’s priority this year was making Shortcuts more approachable for millions of users who will find it on their Home screens as a built-in app.

In iOS 13, actions are displayed as a description of what they do, written in plain English. They are sentences with a main predicate (“add”, “find”, “get”, etc.) and, using parameters, you customize their objects by picking from variables and other options.

Here’s another example:

The expressive nature of actions, with their bold descriptions written in plain English, does make for a more readable editor, particularly for users who have never played with automation before; it’s quite obvious that Apple’s priority this year was making Shortcuts more approachable for millions of users who will find it on their Home screens as a built-in app.

The new action design, however, is not without flaws.

Because all configurable elements in actions are highlighted in blue now, it sometimes is hard to tell variables and plain text apart within the same field. The ‘Show Alert’ action is an egregious example of this downside: in addition to hiding the ‘Title’ field behind ‘Show More’ by default (which I consider a mistake), the body text of an alert has a blue background color in the editor, which wraps across multiple lines and blends with the blue color of a variable. Judge for yourself:

The new alert design in Shortcuts: not great, Bob.

Look at this other alert in dark mode. It’s impossible to easily discern the blue variables against the blue background of the alert’s parameter field:

In iOS 12, variables clearly stood out in fields thanks to their pill-shaped token design; in iOS 13, because both the background color of parameter fields and the variable color are similar shades of blue, everything blends together and is hard to visually differentiate. Another consequence of this design decision: it’s harder to tell that you can tap on variables to expand them and see details of a variable because they’re less inviting to the touch and blend in with the background color instead of standing out from it.

I can go on. When you’re extracting a specific key from a dictionary variable, iOS 13 no longer displays the main dictionary label alongside the key label, resulting in a more confusing appearance:

Both actions extract the value of a ‘Key’ action from a dictionary. iOS 12 made that clear; the new Shortcuts app doesn’t.

The ‘Date’ action is also a regression from iOS 12: while in the old app the action validated a natural language date you typed into its field before continuing, the iOS 13 version doesn’t perform validation at runtime at all:

iOS 12 used to confirm a date was valid at runtime.

There are a handful of other smaller issues and idiosyncrasies that could be mentioned, but these are the most glaring ones in my opinion. I recommend checking out this Reddit thread if you want to see more examples (I don’t agree with all of it, but it’s a good compendium).

Lastly, in terms of upgrading from iOS 12 to iOS 13: because the updated Shortcuts app no longer features a ‘Get Variable’ action, the system will update all your shortcuts to eliminate ‘Get Variable’ and insert the variable in the action where it would have served as input. For example, if in iOS 12 you had a combination of ‘Get Variable - Adjust Date’, in iOS 13 the Shortcuts app will automatically reformat your shortcut to delete the ‘Get Variable’ action, placing the variable into the ‘Adjust Date’ action as a parameter instead.

I upgraded my Shortcuts library twice this summer (with two separate accounts), once for iOS 13 beta 1, then for iOS 13 beta 4. The second time, the migration process was nearly flawless, with old ‘Get Variable’ actions being replaced by other actions and parameters falling into the correct places. That said, if you depend on Shortcuts for important tasks like I do, I would suggest double-checking that the upgrade process was performed correctly once the system finishes updating to iOS 13.

Despite its few missteps, I believe the new Shortcuts editor design is a step in the right direction. Its natural language design makes actions more expressive: long action flows have become shorter and more legible at a glance; by replacing various types of UI controls and fields with parameters displayed in plain English, the editor should feel less intimidating to new users, of which Shortcuts should have plenty in iOS 13. Parameters, more intelligent Siri suggestions, the redesigned action library, and descriptive actions come together in a cohesive package that should allow power users to craft advanced shortcuts with fewer actions, all while enabling newcomers to get started with ease.

There’s never been anything like Shortcuts’ new natural language editor in other automation tools before; I’m curious to see where Apple goes from here.

New Actions and Updates

In addition to parameters, conversational shortcuts, and a revamped editor, Apple also had the time to ship new actions and updates to existing actions in iOS 13. Let’s take a look.

Set Playback Destination

One of the most useful new actions of Shortcuts in my experience, ‘Set Playback Destination’ lets you set a specific output device from a shortcut, without manually selecting it from Control Center or Settings. This action comes with a parameter that opens a picker to select one AirPlay or Bluetooth device to set as the audio output destination for the device where the shortcut is running. The action supports local audio output (device speakers), HomePods, Apple TV, AirPlay-enabled devices (including TVs), AirPods, and generic Bluetooth headphones.

As I’ll detail later, I’ve implemented this action in various shortcuts that fetch Apple Music playlists (or Podcasts episodes) and start playback on a nearby HomePod or my AirPods. Even though iOS makes it easy to switch between different output devices from Control Center, I’ve enjoyed the convenience of doing so with shortcuts that can be activated from a widget or, even better, with an automation such as tapping an NFC sticker. More importantly, these shortcuts also contain other actions for music or podcast playback, which have helped me create “media templates” that wouldn’t be supported by Control Center alone.

‘Set Playback Destination’ uses AirPlay 2 for streaming to AirPlay devices: in my tests, switching from local playback through the iPhone’s speakers to a HomePod involved a small delay of about a second, not the 3-4 seconds typically required by AirPlay 1. Unfortunately though, this action can’t connect to multiple AirPlay 2 speakers at once (a feature supported by AirPlay 2), nor can it create independent audio streams on AirPlay 2 devices – it can only stream directly from iOS to AirPlay 2. In the future, I’d like Apple to continue expanding the AirPlay 2 implementation of this action.

Apple TV Remote

In more media-related enhancements, Shortcuts in iOS 13 comes with a suite of actions to control the Apple TV device, with another useful one launching with iOS 13.1.

In iOS 13, Shortcuts comes with four Apple TV actions:

Play/Pause Apple TV

Show Remote Control

Sleep Apple TV

Wake Apple TV

The names are pretty self-explanatory: these actions perform the selected task on an Apple TV on the same local network as the device running Shortcuts. The Apple TV device is a parameter: you’ll have to pick an Apple TV found on your network from a list.

In iOS 13.1, you can open any app installed on your Apple TV from Shortcuts.

While the other actions control the Apple TV directly, ‘Show Remote Control’ simply loads the Apple TV remote UI for the selected TV on your iOS device.

In iOS 13.1, Shortcuts will gain an additional Apple TV action: ‘Open App on Apple TV’. As the name suggests, this action lets you open a specific app on your Apple TV – and not just built-in Apple apps, but all third-party apps and games that you may have installed on the selected Apple TV. This action will unlock fascinating possibilities for Apple TV automation: for instance, you’ll be able to create custom shortcuts that set your lights to a specific color, pause all your HomePods, wake the Apple TV, and open Netflix – and you can do it all with one tap from a widget, or by using a Siri phrase.

For now, Shortcuts’ Apple TV integration is limited to waking or sleeping an Apple TV and toggling its playback state. They are welcome enhancements, as I’ll detail in my shortcut examples later, but I believe more interesting automation use cases will become possible in iOS 13.1.

Set Appearance

As part of Shortcuts’ deeper integration with the Settings app in iOS 13, Apple added an action to set the device’s appearance to light or dark mode. There really isn’t much to explain: the mode is a parameter, and you can either enable light or dark mode, but you can’t toggle between them, which is a surprising omission.

Alas, this action doesn’t let you toggle between modes.

I’m guessing that this action will be used to switch between appearance modes from a widget, or as a tool to communicate something to the user depending on the output of other actions. If you have a shortcut that runs every morning, you could have Shortcuts enable dark mode if the forecast for the day is rainy. Or if your todo list contains over 30 items for the day – whatever communicates a sense of dread and despair to you. Just an idea.

Home

Along with a magic variable to check on accessory characteristics in conditional blocks, Shortcuts’ integration with the Home app extends to two new actions to get the state of accessories and control them – both with the same UI and full set of controls available in the Home app.

When Apple relaunched Workflow as Shortcuts last year, the app’s HomeKit integration was limited to a ‘Run Home Scene’ action that let you manually pick one among your existing HomeKit scenes. In iOS 13, that custom implementation has been completely ripped out in favor of embedding parts of the Home app’s UI into Shortcuts as modal panels that look and behave exactly like in the Home app, for better or worse.

The ‘Control My Home’ action brings the Home app’s interface into Shortcuts.

The ‘Get State of My Home’ action is the standalone version of the magic variable that can be embedded in conditional blocks. The action lets you pick an accessory from a Home window so you can select a characteristic to read as a parameter. The variable returned for accessory characteristics can be embedded in other actions, which opens up some intriguing possibilities for automation based on the state of accessories around the house.

In iOS 13, you can access every characteristic of every accessory in your home.

With ‘Control My Home’, you essentially have a mini Home app embedded within Shortcuts that lets you assign state and characteristics to devices before running a shortcut. It’s like setting up a scene or automation in the Home app, only it’s done from the Shortcuts editor. With this action, it’s finally possible to create shortcuts that go beyond turning on scenes: you can fully control any of your HomeKit accessories, and you can even assign multiple accessories to the same action to change their state at once.

Just like the Home app.

The “downside” of this approach is that, because accessories are controlled with a Home UI inside Shortcuts, you won’t be able to pass text variables to an accessory. I think that’s probably for the best: you wouldn’t want incorrect output from an action to perform something unexpected around the house.

I’ve been having fun creating custom shortcuts that let me change the color of my lights from a widget using a ‘Choose from Menu’ action, or which turn off the lights, pause music, and set my HomeKit security system to “armed” in one go. And because the Home actions are natively integrated with the HomeKit framework on iOS, they’ll work with remote access out of the box, so you’ll be able to control accessories and get their state via Shortcuts even when you’re away from home.

Podcasts

Apple built a native integration with the system’s Podcasts app to retrieve podcasts from the user’s library and play them, as well as search the Apple Podcasts catalog and subscribe to new shows. The new actions, available under Apps ⇾ Podcasts in the action library, are the following:

Get Details of Podcast

Get Episodes of Podcast

Get Podcasts from Library

Play Podcast

Search Podcast

Subscribe to Podcast

Modeled after existing integrations with other Apple apps – namely Reminders, Notes, and Music – these actions can natively access the contents of your Podcasts library in the background and have been designed from the ground up with support for parameters.

Playing a podcast in Shortcuts for iOS 13 is as easy as adding a single action and picking the show as a parameter from a pre-populated list.

In the ‘Play Podcast’ and ‘Get Episodes of Podcast’ actions, the Podcast bit is a parameter represented by an empty blue field that you can tap to load a list of the podcasts you’re currently subscribed to as fetched from the Podcasts app directly by Shortcuts. You can start playing a podcast simply by picking a show as a parameter in the ‘Play Podcast’ action; if you go the traditional route and use actions to get a variable from the Podcasts app such as ‘Get Podcasts from Library’, you’ll be able to inspect the resulting magic variable and change its type, just like you can with other existing actions in Shortcuts for iOS 12.

Podcast results can be inspected as magic variables throughout a shortcut.

Searching for and subscribing to podcasts have also been fun additions to Shortcuts: the entire iTunes database of shows can be queried from Shortcuts, and once you’ve found a show you want to listen to in the future, you can subscribe to it without ever opening the Podcasts app. Podcasts actions play particularly well with ‘Set Playback Destination’ and they’re well-suited for automated triggers: you could, for instance, start playing the latest episode of one of your favorite podcasts as soon as Bluetooth headphones are connected to your iPhone. I’m glad to see another Apple app such as Podcasts ship Shortcuts actions; next up – I’d like to search Podcasts transcripts.

What’s New in Siri

This year’s Siri update doesn’t introduce groundbreaking changes such as iOS 12’s Siri shortcuts, but there are still a handful of great improvements to the assistant, which we’ve highlighted in a standalone story here.

Siri has a new voice in iOS 13, powered by a process called Neural TTS that helps it sound more fluid, with a more natural intonation and pauses between sentences. There are considerable enhancements to SiriKit’s media capabilities: third-party music, podcast, and audiobook players can now integrate with Siri and expose commands to play, add content to the user’s library, search, or like/dislike items. This enables third-party music and podcast players to become first-class experiences when used via Siri on Apple devices, and we can’t wait to play around with them here at MacStories. Expect more coverage on SiriKit’s new media playback features later this year.

Playing podcast episodes and playlists with Castamatic, a podcast app that has adopted SiriKit’s new media intents in iOS 13.

In terms of intelligence updates, Siri is now smarter in recognizing events such as reservations, rental car bookings, and booked flights; when these events are found by Siri, the Calendar app will bring up a local notification, which you can use to add an event to your schedule. Reservation details are synced with Siri and, of course, they’re encrypted across devices.

There’s a bunch of other improvements to Siri (my favorite: adding multiple reminders at once), but I’ll refer you to Ryan’s in-depth story on it, where you’ll find more details and Ryan’s thoughts on this year’s upgrade.

Accessibility

Shortcuts in iOS 13 comes with over a dozen new actions to enable specific Accessibility settings. It’s an extensive list: you can open the Magnifier, activate options such as Reduce Transparency or AssistiveTouch, and even tweak the system’s text size choosing one among multiple available sizes. All actions support both ‘Turn On/Off’ and ‘Toggle’ behavior, too.

Some of the new Accessibility actions.

While iOS 13 makes it easier to reach the Accessibility screen as it’s now a top-level item in the Settings app, certain features still require too many taps to activate. With Shortcuts, key Accessibility settings – including the powerful new Voice Control – can now be activated with one tap from the app’s widget, and they can be combined with other actions for personalized automation. I use the AssistiveTouch action to quickly enable mouse support when my Logitech mouse connects to the iPad Pro. I recall Apple specifically calling out Workflow’s Accessibility potential when the app was acquired in 2017, so it’s good to see the story reach its logical conclusion with full Accessibility integration in Shortcuts.

Other Action Improvements

Here’s a list of smaller, yet appreciated changes to other actions in Shortcuts for iOS 13.

New ‘Location’ action. New in iOS 13, the ‘Location’ action has a parameter that opens a screen where you can choose to fetch the current location or search for an address in Apple Maps. The ‘Get Current Location’ action still exists, but I find this one more versatile thanks to its blend of current location and user-defined addresses.

Better Home screen shortcuts. Adding a shortcut to the Home screen no longer relies on the hack-y workaround that I reverse-engineered last year. You can now install a shortcut on the Home screen directly from the Shortcuts app as the feature is not based on Safari web clips anymore.

When you run a shortcut from the Home screen in iOS 13, it’ll open directly into the Shortcuts app, which runs the shortcut immediately without showing you a splash screen first (splash screens are typical of web apps installed on the Home screen).

New options for adding shortcuts to the Home screen in iOS 13.

Thanks to these improvements, running shortcuts from the Home screen is faster, more reliable, and more useful than it could ever be in Workflow and iOS 12’s Shortcuts app. I’ll have more to say about my Home screen shortcut setup, as well as a surprise I’ve been preparing this summer, soon. But not yet.

Choose from List. In iOS 13, if the ‘Choose from List’ action has to present over 7 items at once, it’ll use a new popover design (a sheet on iPhone) that comes with an integrated search bar. The same also applies to the ‘Choose from Menu’ action.

If you often deal with large lists of items, the ability to filter a list via search is a nice touch.

Get Article. The options supported by the ‘Get Article’ action haven’t changed, but its parsing is now powered by the Safari Reader engine (rather than the third-party Diffbot API) and runs on-device. In my experience, Safari Reader extraction has been faster and more accurate than Diffbot. Additionally, the ‘Get Article’ action now has a parameter for a URL to extract an article from – you won’t have to connect it to a ‘Safari Webpage’ item, and it’ll work inside the Shortcuts app for any link that points to a web article.

Extracts articles using Safari Reader.

Authentication with SSH keys. In iOS 13.1, Shortcuts is gaining the ability to run script on servers using SSH keys for authentication rather than plain passwords. You can generate both RSA and ed25519 keys from within Shortcuts, which should help when connecting to servers that implement modern public-key authentication systems.

New ‘Send Email’ action. In iOS 13, the ‘Send Email’ action no longer requires authentication with an email provider but is instead a full extension of the Mail app. You can send a message with any of the accounts you’ve configured in the Mail app and assign parameters for body text, subject, and recipients.

The new Mail integration in Shortcuts.

What’s great about this action is that if you disable the ‘Show Compose Sheet’ toggle, messages will be sent via Apple’s Mail app in the background. Plus, you can decide whether you want to send a message immediately or save it as a draft in Mail instead.

As someone’s who’s recently gone back to Apple’s Mail app, I’m happy to see native integration with Shortcuts that doesn’t force me to log into all my email accounts again.

Support for Notes folders. Both the ‘Create Note’ and ‘Find Note’ actions now support creating or finding notes in specific folders. Alas, this is the only improvement for Notes actions in iOS 13, which are still limited to plain text and don’t support formatted text or attachments. I hope that’ll become possible before iOS 14.

Share shortcuts with shortcuts. In iOS 13.1, in addition to the standard share sheet method, you will be able to generate iCloud.com links for your shortcuts using the ‘Get Link to File’ action. This tweak is a welcome addition for all those who share shortcuts with others on a regular basis: now instead of interacting with the share sheet, you can combine the ‘Get My Shortcuts’ action with ‘Get Link to File’ to share shortcuts more quickly; you’ll only be asked to confirm sharing with an alert.

Automating shortcut sharing in iOS 13.1.

Moreover, the ‘Get Link to File’ action supports uploading multiple shortcuts at once, which makes it an ideal candidate for shortcuts that generate backups of your entire Shortcuts library. Considering that the ability to import shortcuts from files has been removed in iOS 13, it makes sense for Apple to extend the ways in which users can back up their shortcuts as iCloud URLs instead.

Playback actions. Shortcuts’ playback actions (Play, Skip Forward, Skip Backward) now let you control on which device to control playback using the same picker UI of ‘Set Playback Destination’. Also, the ‘Play’ action supports both play, pause, and a play/pause toggle mode.

Show Reminders lists. You can now open a specific Reminders list with the ‘Show Reminders List’ action. That’s it. That’s all it does.

Get All Alarms. Lastly, it is now possible to get a list of all the alarms you’ve already set up in the Clock app using the ‘Get All Alarms’ action. This is useful when combined with ‘Choose from List’ and ‘Toggle Alarm’ to pick one of your configured alarms and enable it for the next morning.

Automations

Over the past year, Apple listened to feedback from the Shortcuts community and implemented what has perhaps been the most commonly requested feature: the ability to run shortcuts automatically, sometimes even in the background, using triggers. Called Automation, this feature is arguably the most powerful enhancement to the Shortcuts app this year, unlocking a new layer of personalization wherein your devices can now react to changes in conditions and perform custom tasks on their own. It is the fulfillment of Shortcuts’ vision of the programmable assistant, and I believe it inaugurates a new chapter for automation across all Apple platforms.

However, despite the anticipation surrounding it, Automation in Shortcuts isn’t launching with iOS 13.0 today: to take advantage of the best new feature in the updated Shortcuts app, you’ll have to wait until iOS 13.1.

For the past few months, I’ve been using a series of automations on my iPhone, iPad, and HomeKit hubs to perform automated tasks I’ve always dreamed of being able to execute in the background without my input. So even though automations aren’t included in today’s iOS 13 update, they’re part of a bigger story around Shortcuts and its role in the modern Apple ecosystem, and I want to explain why.

Personal Automation

There are two types of automations supported in iOS 13.1: personal and Home automations. Both can be set up in the Automation tab of the Shortcuts app; Home automations can also be created and managed in the Automation section of the Home app; all your existing Home automations will also appear in Shortcuts.

A list of automations in Shortcuts.

Personal automation consists of shortcuts that are run, either in the background or following your manual confirmation, after a trigger has fired off. There are three main types of triggers: Events, Travel, and Settings; the Events and Travel triggers are largely inspired by similar triggers available in the Home app for time of day or location, and they’re configured the same way in Shortcuts; everything else is all-new.

Here is the complete list of triggers so far supported by Shortcuts in iOS 13.1:

Events

Time of Day: You can run a shortcut at a specific time of the day, down to the minute, with relative thresholds available for sunrise and sunset times (like in the Home app). You can also set repeating schedules for days of the week.

Alarm: Run a shortcut when an alarm is stopped or snoozed. You can choose from any alarm, a wake-up alarm, or a specific alarm from the ones already configured in the Clock app.

Apple Watch Workout: In this case, a shortcut will run when a workout recorded on your Apple Watch starts, ends, or both. You can choose from any workout or a specific workout type supported by watchOS.

Travel

Arrive: Run a shortcut when you arrive at a specific location. Like in the Home app, you can specify a time range during which the location-based trigger will be active.

Leave: Same as above, but for leaving a specific location.

Before I Commute: This one is interesting. Using Siri’s intelligence, this trigger will try to predict when you’ll be commuting to work or back home. You can then choose to trigger the automation at either the predicted time, or 5, 10, 15, 30, or 60 minutes beforehand.

CarPlay: Connecting to or disconnecting from CarPlay can trigger an automation.

Settings

Airplane Mode: When turned on or off.

Wi-Fi: Run a shortcut when connected to any or specific Wi-Fi networks.

Bluetooth: When connected to any or specific Bluetooth devices, including Bluetooth car units.

Do Not Disturb: When turned on or off.

Low Power Mode: When turned on or off.

NFC: With this trigger, you’ll be able to run a shortcut by scanning an NFC tag with your iPhone. Any compatible NFC tag is supported by Shortcuts, including NFC stickers you can buy inexpensively on Amazon or the chips embedded within amiibo figurines or contactless cards (because why not). Modern iPhones (XR, XS, 11, and 11 Pro) can scan NFC tags in the background from anywhere in the system without having the Shortcuts app open in the foreground, a capability that is not available to third-party apps yet.

Open App: Run a shortcut every time a specific app is opened.

Creating a personal automation that plays music on a HomePod when a specific time of day occurs. This automation will require a confirmation step before running.

As you can see, Apple didn’t build automation support in Shortcuts by adding a couple of frequently requested triggers such as location and time of day: they went all-in with a full library of triggers that tap into an iOS device’s location, status, wireless connection, apps, and more. Obviously, this deep integration between hardware, user interaction, and software is something that only Apple can do in a secure, high-performance environment. The triggers supported by Shortcuts are infinitely more reliable, secure, and integrated with the system than anything Launch Center Pro or Launcher could ever ship, making those apps’ custom implementations of schedules and routines to run shortcuts instantly obsolete in iOS 13.1.

There’s an important distinction to be made regarding the different kinds of personal automations you can create. Not all personal automations can run in the background without user confirmation, which is likely going to be a contentious point of debate in the Shortcuts community. Here’s a basic rule to keep in mind: if a trigger depends on an environmental condition outside of your direct manipulation, you’ll have to confirm running a shortcut by tapping a notification.

You can confirm an automation from anywhere, including the Lock screen, by tapping ‘Run’ in a notification.

However, if an automation’s trigger is the result of an action you have physically performed outside of Shortcuts, you can disable an ‘Ask Before Running’ toggle in the automation editor, which will allow the automation to run in the background without requiring user confirmation (but you’ll still see a notification when a shortcut runs automatically).

Examples of automations that can run without an extra confirmation step.

So how can you tell whether or not a trigger supports background execution? It comes down to whether the trigger is based on something that happened to your device or that you made physically happen with your actions.

For example, shortcuts based on a schedule will always require an extra confirmation step before running: as far as I know, humans can’t directly control the passing of time; a specific time of day is an environmental condition that happens at some point during the day, and Apple wants to ensure you’re aware that an automation is about to run by confirming it. The same is true for other conditions that are not the result of a direct user action: if your phone connects to a Wi-Fi network or Bluetooth accessory in the background, you’ll have to manually confirm an automation; if your location changes because you’re on the move and not necessarily paying attention to your iPhone, Shortcuts will require you to confirm an automation too.22

With this in mind, here are the triggers that support confirmation-less mode in iOS 13.1:

CarPlay

Airplane Mode

Do Not Disturb

Low Power Mode

NFC

Open App

Apple Watch Workout

Alarm

With the exclusion of CarPlay, all of these triggers are based on actions the user has to physically perform on a device’s screen, by running another shortcut with Siri, or by tapping an iPhone against an NFC tag.

I understand Apple’s position regarding triggers and background execution. The company likely didn’t want to introduce a feature that made it possible for automations to run unfettered in the background, particularly in the first release of an app that just got pushed to the Home screens of millions of people. The current limitations, though tedious for power users, are reasonable boundaries for the masses.

That said, I wonder if Apple could have found ways to mitigate the annoyance derived by confirming automations for expert users who know what they’re doing. There’s a larger discussion about Apple’s security concerns and permission dialog obsession here (more later); in the case of automations, I would have liked to see an “expert mode” to outright disable confirmation steps. Or perhaps Shortcuts could learn from my usage: if I manually confirm an automation enough times each week, maybe the app could prompt me to disable the extra step the next time it runs.

Despite these minor criticisms, I’ve been taking advantage of automations to great effect on my iPhone and iPad. My automation setup is still a work in progress, but I’d like to share some examples that should give you an idea of the power and flexibility of triggers combined with Shortcuts.

You don’t need to craft complex series of actions for an automation to be useful. In fact, some of my favorite automations run shortcuts made of 2-3 actions that perform something consistently and quickly, so I don’t have to. For example, whenever I finish a workout with my Apple Watch, Shortcuts adds a reminder due in 5 minutes to remind me to drink at least three glasses of water. It’s easy for me to get lost in stats measured by my heart rate sensor and forget to hydrate properly after a run; with this automation, a reminder will be created without confirmation, and all it takes is two actions.

When a workout ends, remind me to hydrate.

In the Shortcuts app, you can set up an automation by either creating a new shortcut from scratch, or you can use the ‘Run Shortcut’ action to run one of your existing shortcuts. You can, of course, mix and match both techniques in the same shortcut as well. A good example of this approach is the automation that runs when I start a workout: first, Shortcuts sets the playback destination to my AirPods; then, it brings up a menu that lets me choose whether I want to listen to some podcasts or shuffle my Workout playlist. While the workout playlist is fetched using a single Music action, podcasts are based on an external shortcut (which I will share below) that is called via the ‘Run Shortcut’ action. This way, I was able to recycle an existing shortcut without setting it up again inside the automation editor. Even though this automation has been set up without confirmation, because the shortcut requires me to pick from a menu, the Shortcuts app will automatically launch on my iPhone and bring up the menu as soon as a workout starts.

When a workout starts, play some music or a podcast episode.

One of my most used automations is a single-action shortcut: whenever I open Podcasts on my iPhone, the volume is set to 100%. I always want to listen to shows at full volume, especially because Apple’s Podcasts app doesn’t have an Overcast-like voice boost mode; this automation maxes out the volume every time I open it without having to do anything else. I just need to make sure I don’t open the app while my iPhone is streaming to the HomePod.

When Podcasts opens, the volume is set to 100%. I don’t need to confirm this automation, but I still get a notification.

Another automation based on the ‘Open App’ trigger is the one I have for the TV app. I never watch shows or movies with the TV app on my iPhone, which means that if I open it, it’s because I need to buy a movie or TV show episode I’m about to watch on the big screen. Thus, when the TV app on my iPhone launches, the Apple TV wakes up and opens its own TV app.

When I open TV, wake TV on the TV. This doesn’t sound confusing at all.

Speaking of simple automations: another favorite of mine is the one that, when I arrive at the supermarket, opens my Grocery list in the Reminders app:

Since I discovered that Apple added proper NFC support to Shortcuts for triggers, I’ve started placing compatible stickers around the house, as well as in my car, to execute automations with a single tap of my iPhone.23

In the past, I played around with NFC triggers in Launch Center Pro, but due to system limitations, the app could only bring up a notification upon a successful scan, forcing me to tap it to launch a URL scheme, which could potentially open the Shortcuts app and execute a shortcut. In iOS 13.1, as I mentioned above, Shortcuts’ NFC triggers require no confirmation and you can scan tags from anywhere, including the Home and Lock screens (if authenticated).

NFC setup in Shortcuts.

In the Shortcuts app, any empty NFC tag works as an automation trigger: Shortcuts doesn’t need to read any data off the tag, nor does it need to write data to it – it only uses NFC as a trigger to run other actions.

If you have existing NFC stickers, remember that iOS will automatically display a notification for data already written onto them such as URLs or contact cards, which may get in the way of using those stickers for Shortcuts; you likely wouldn’t be interested in the pre-written data. My advice is to set up NFC triggers with empty stickers or tags.

One of the first NFC-based automations I set up was a simple shortcut that sets my playback destination to a specific HomePod, sets the volume to a certain level, and starts playing an Apple Music playlist on shuffle. This way, when I tap the NFC sticker next to the kitchen table, music starts playing at a relatively low volume through the HomePod in the kitchen, providing some nice background music if we have guests over. This automation takes about three seconds to run and Shortcuts performs every action on its own without having to launch the main app or request my authorization to run. It’s a great way to start playing music for those times when I don’t want to talk to Siri, and I especially appreciate the ability to set the output volume beforehand.

I have a similar setup with the NFC sticker I attached to my nightstand (it’s an anti-metal one that works with my metal nightstand from IKEA). This one, however, also turns on my ‘Red Bedroom’ light scene via the ‘Control My Home’ action. With this automation, in addition to shuffling our favorite before-bed playlist on the bedroom HomePod, Shortcuts also dims the lights and turns them red, which helps us fall asleep.

When I tap the NFC sticker on my nightstand, Shortcuts starts streaming music to the HomePod and turns the lights red.

For the NFC sticker I attached next to the window control buttons in my car on the left side of the driver’s seat, I reused the same approach of the ‘Workout starts’ automation. There are two kinds of actions I typically want to perform when I’m in my car: if I’ve just gotten home, I want to let my girlfriend know by sending her a text message; or, if I’m about to drive somewhere, I may want to put on some music or play a podcast. Because I don’t have a CarPlay-enabled car, and because this automation can’t rely on car Bluetooth as a trigger (if I just arrived home, it means my iPhone has been connected to the car’s Bluetooth system for a while), it made sense for me to use a sticker as a trigger in the car.

The NFC sticker in my car.

To accommodate both use cases, the shortcut associated with the ‘Car’ NFC trigger uses a ‘Choose from Menu’ action that lets me pick between sending a message to Silvia or running another shortcut to pick between music and podcasts. As soon as I tap the sticker with my iPhone, the Shortcuts app instantly launches and the menu comes up. The message to Silvia is pre-filled and has the ‘Show When Run’ toggle disabled, so it can be sent in the background without having to tap ‘Send’ in an iMessage composer window. Alternatively, the playlist shortcut that runs as a function displays another menu with options to shuffle a playlist or play one of my podcasts.

Automation for my car.

I have a lot more ideas for NFC I’d like to experiment with. I want to place a sticker on my microphone stand, so I can prepare my desk for podcasting just by tapping my iPhone on it; I want to explore the idea of scanning the NFC chip built into the Sony headphones I use with my TV to wake up the television and open a specific app or channel through HomeKit (and homebridge); I may even consider creating a set of NFC stickers, each with a different color or icon on it, that invoke specific timers for time tracking via Toggl.

I see incredible potential in blending the physical world and Shortcuts via NFC and automation; playing around with all of this has been a lot of fun, and it made me appreciate the time savings granted by Shortcuts even more.

Home Automation

Apple’s other automation initiative in iOS 13.1 is the ability to run custom shortcuts as HomeKit automations directly on HomeKit hubs that work for everyone in the home. This is going to be a big deal for advanced home automation, and it shows how Apple now considers the Shortcuts app a proper framework to be shared across different areas of iOS.

When you create a home automation in iOS 13.1 in either the Home app or Shortcuts, in addition to controlling scenes and individual accessories, you’ll be able to execute custom shortcuts once a trigger fires off. But there’s a twist: unlike personal automations, shortcuts for home automations are completely separate from the Shortcuts app – they run directly on HomeKit hubs (iPads, Apple TVs, and HomePods) as they must be able to execute actions even when you’re not home.

This means a few things. First, parts of the Shortcuts app have been integrated with platforms capable of managing HomeKit automations: you’ll find a Shortcuts UI to create custom home automations in macOS Catalina, for instance, even though there is no official Shortcuts app for Mac. Second, because these shortcuts are entirely separate from the Shortcuts app as they need to run on HomeKit hubs, they don’t have access to your Shortcuts app’s library, nor can they present actions that require user interactions. For similar reasons, these shortcuts can’t use actions from third-party apps and they can’t fetch files from iCloud Drive.

A home automation that runs a custom shortcut in iOS 13.1.

Therefore, when creating a home automation that runs as a custom shortcut (in both Home and Shortcuts: Automation ⇾ New ⇾ (select trigger) ⇾ Convert to Shortcut), you will only have access to a subset of Shortcuts actions, which can run independently and without user input. Additionally, you will not be able to reuse existing shortcuts with the ‘Run Shortcut’ action: you’ll have to create shortcuts from scratch choosing from a smaller selection of actions.

With this in mind, the potential opened up by the ability to execute custom shortcuts as part of a HomeKit environment is immense, and I’m still wrapping my head around all the possible combinations of HomeKit accessories and conditions paired with shortcuts. But I have some fascinating examples to share.

Over the past year, I’ve purchased a handful of Eve buttons, which are programmable buttons that can be assigned different automations in Home depending on whether you perform a single press, a long press, or a double press. Before iOS 13.1, I only used these buttons to turn my lights on and off.

With the ability to run shortcuts in home automations, I’ve rethought the role of my Eve buttons, which now serve as physical switches to make my lights a certain color and start specific timers via the Toggl API. The most powerful aspect of custom home automation in iOS 13.1, in fact, is the ability to use the ‘Get Contents of URL’ action to have HomeKit hubs interact with any web API even while you’re not around. When I discovered that this was possible, I refactored my existing Toggl shortcuts, configuring them again inside the Home app as automations; as a result, the Eve button in the kitchen can now turn the lights green and start the ‘Writing’ timer on the Toggl web service whenever I press it once.

Starting a Toggl timer via API as a native home automation thanks to custom shortcuts.

I spent the summer setting up these web-based automations inside HomeKit; I think it’s incredible that with the press of a physical button, my home can now issue requests to web APIs and combine those with other home-related actions. But I’ve also gone beyond the Toggl API and the Eve buttons.

With the press of a physical button, my home can now issue requests to web APIs.

Earlier this year, we set up a HomeKit security system based on the Aqara hub combined with a separate (and very loud) siren I bought from Amazon, which is hooked up to HomeKit via a smart plug. There are, obviously, multiple window/door contact sensors around the house that trigger the security system when it’s armed. Thanks to custom shortcuts in Home automations with iOS 13.1, I’ve been able to add SMS and Pushover notifications to the security system. Now if a window/door sensor triggers when nobody’s home, in addition to triggering the siren and Aqara hub simultaneously, HomeKit will contact the Twilio API to send SMS alerts to my girlfriend and me with a custom message and timestamp; in addition, the automation will turn on all the lights, and perform a second web API call – this time to Pushover, which will send us a second batch of emergency push notifications about a possible intrusion.

If the siren triggers, Home sends us multiple emergency notifications via custom shortcuts.

I was happy with the security system I set up earlier this year, but I was missing the built-in integration with SMS and push notifications that other proprietary services offer. Thanks to custom shortcuts in home automations, my DIY solution is now more powerful – and likely more reliable – than third-party alternatives as it can send all the notifications I want and perform any arbitrary number of actions via custom shortcuts. I control every part of the experience, and everything is based on the combination of HomeKit and Shortcuts.

These are just two examples of the versatility of custom home automations powered by the Shortcuts framework in iOS 13.1, but I think they should give you a good idea of what’s coming. As with personal automation, I’m still experimenting with all of this, and I will have more to share later this year – especially once HomePods and AirPlay 2 speakers will be able to join in on the fun.

I always hoped that Apple would allow users to run shortcuts automatically, and I knew that the Shortcuts app could be well-suited for advanced home automations. For both personal and home automations, iOS 13.1 goes beyond my wildest expectations for either feature, allowing for a greater degree of freedom than I anticipated. It’s too bad that automations aren’t launching today alongside iOS 13, but it’s important for Apple to get these functionalities right before shipping them to millions of customers.

I’m convinced that automations will play a fundamental role in the future of the Shortcuts app and system framework; they’ll be worth the wait.

Sharing and Privacy

With iOS 13, Apple has imposed tighter security restrictions on custom shortcuts. This doesn’t come as a surprise following some examples of shortcuts accessing hidden system data that were shared on social networks last year (which I will not link), and I understand Apple’s underlying concerns; for most people, especially considering the influx of new users in iOS 13, I think Apple’s privacy and security restrictions are reasonable. For longtime users of the app – the folks who have advocated in favor of iOS automation and Shortcuts for years – there are, however, some unfortunate downsides worth mentioning.

iOS 13 brings a fundamental change to how permissions are granted to shortcuts that want to access personal user data. In the new Shortcuts app, permissions are scoped to individual shortcuts: if you download a shortcut shared by another user, you’ll be asked to authorize access to personal data (such as Reminders, Files, Health, and, new in iOS 13, actions from third-party apps) for the first time on a per-shortcut basis. If you create a shortcut yourself, permissions are implicitly granted and you won’t be asked to authorize access to a certain feature with a permission prompt: after all, you have to drag actions manually into the Shortcuts editor; Apple uses that action as an implicit signal of trust.

Permissions are granted on a per-shortcut basis in iOS 13.

The exception to these rules is the ‘Get Contents of URL’ action: even if you create a shortcut yourself, you’ll be asked to grant the shortcut access to the Internet with a permission prompt. Additionally, the ‘Get Contents of URL’ action requires you to grant access on a per-domain basis; if you have multiple shortcuts that work with the same web APIs, you’ll have to grant access to every shortcut and every website the first time you run each one – even if you created them.

With this new system based on granting permissions to individual shortcuts, Apple has changed how you can review permissions granted to the app. In addition to checking which system features the Shortcuts app has access to under Settings ⇾ Privacy, you can now review permissions for individual shortcuts in a shortcut’s Details screen. Here, you’ll find the features and apps each shortcut has access to, and you’ll be able to revoke those permissions with the flick of a switch.

You can now review permissions granted to an individual shortcut.

Let me be blunt: as someone who knows what he’s doing with Shortcuts and always checks the actions of shortcuts shared by others, these permission prompts annoy me. In what has become a trend with macOS Catalina too, I feel like I’m being constantly asked to grant permission to something I’ve already authorized; even though that is not technically true, the barrage of similar prompts for someone who has hundreds of shortcuts in their library results in inevitable frustration and lack of attention. It’s the Windows Vista problem all over again: when everything brings up a permission prompt, the easiest solution ends up being a mindless tap on the ‘Okay’ button to get the computer out of your way.

But here’s the thing: I can’t blame Apple for implementing these permission prompts and making them the default behavior in iOS 13. I pay close attention to the Shortcuts community, both on Twitter and Reddit, and over the past year I’ve seen some questionable uses of the ‘Get Contents of URL’ action to call remote servers and install .shortcut files on a user’s device without going through iCloud.com. I’ve always fought against the idea of adding these kinds of external dependencies to my shortcuts, and it bothers me to see folks sharing shortcuts that contain hidden web API calls or actions masqueraded as one thing, yet performing something else entirely. In some ways, Apple cracking down on permissions and access to remote URLs was the only possible outcome. I feel like we should be grateful that Apple didn’t outright remove certain actions following some of the shortcuts that have been shared over the last 12 months.

Which brings me to sharing. In iOS 13, installing custom shortcuts shared by others is disabled by default. It is still possible to install shortcuts shared by other people – such as the shortcuts in the MacStories Shortcuts Archive – but you’ll have to enable a setting called ‘Allow Untrusted Shortcuts’ first. And for the setting to even appear, you need to have run one or more shortcuts already – either from the gallery, via an app’s ‘Add to Siri’ UI, or one that you created yourself. After that, ‘Allow Untrusted Shortcuts’ will become available under Settings ⇾ Shortcuts ⇾ Sharing Security, and you’ll be able to install shortcuts made by others.

You need to visit Settings to enable the installation of shortcuts made by others.

As someone who’s been advocating for iOS automation and sharing hundreds of workflows, then shortcuts, with readers for years, my perspective on this is obviously biased. I get the sense that folks at Apple must have gotten seriously concerned about the security implications of sharing shortcuts; like I said, I can understand where they’re coming from. But I also can’t shake the feeling that disabling installation of shared shortcuts by default, paired with the menacing wording chosen by Apple, may do more harm than good to the Shortcuts community in the long run. And I hope I’m wrong.

Let’s take a look at the measures implemented by Apple. First, as I mentioned above, the ‘Allow Untrusted Shortcuts’ option isn’t listed in Settings by default; it has to be enabled after running a shortcut for the first time. Once the setting is available, enabling it requires typing in your device passcode – not even Face ID or Touch ID are supported. If you don’t enable untrusted shortcuts, tapping on an iCloud link to a shortcut (which is now the only way to install shortcuts) displays a message with no actionable information. In that case, you’ll only be able to install shortcuts from Apple’s gallery.

If you don’t enable untrusted shortcuts (left) you won’t be able to install shortcuts shared by others.

If you have enabled untrusted shortcuts and tap a link to a shared shortcut, you’ll be presented with a window that features a scary red ‘Add Untrusted Shortcut’ button. If the button wasn’t enough to make it look like you’re about to do something terrible to your device, some helpful explanatory text reminds you that untrusted shortcuts “can put your personal data at risk”. Except that’s not technically true because every personal action is gated by permission prompts on a per-shortcut basis now, but I digress.

Big scary button.

When looking at these limitations on sharing, it’s hard not to get the feeling that some people at Apple regret having allowed the Shortcuts app to continue installing shared shortcuts last year. And that, over the past year, others have fought and debated internally to find an acceptable compromise to keep installation of shared shortcuts available, albeit in a limited, semi-hidden form.

As I argued for personal automation, and as others have suggested regarding the permission prompt fever of macOS Catalina, I wish there was an “expert mode” to give advanced users the peace of mind of using a computer as they always have, with fewer roadblocks that get in the way of using an app they’ve learned to master over the course of five years since Workflow originally launched. I believe that expert users – the people reading this very paragraph – will learn to live with Apple’s tighter restrictions, and they’ll continue to install shortcuts made by others, but one thing’s sure: this whole process doesn’t spark joy.

Looking at the big-picture motivation behind these changes, I’ll say this: Apple knows better than us users when it comes to security and privacy, and we trust them to do what’s best for us, even if we don’t understand their decisions right away. My only hope is that Apple remembers that the creativity of Shortcuts users is not the enemy. Part of what made Workflow special, which is still true for Shortcuts today, was the community – the people who advocated for automation, helped others by sharing shortcuts, and made iOS a more enjoyable operating system by enhancing it with Shortcuts. To put an end to that creativity and communal aspect of Shortcuts would be in Apple’s power, but it would also be a shame. I’m happy that sharing is still supported in Shortcuts today; I hope Apple won’t go beyond what they’ve done this year.

Now, let’s move on to a happier topic: while I still can, I have some shortcuts to share.

Shortcut Examples

As with last year, the best way to understand the potential of the Shortcuts app is to download some examples, run them, and modify them to your needs.

Below, you’ll find a series of shortcuts I’ve put together specifically for this review. Most of them can be downloaded for free; the more advanced ones are exclusive to Club MacStories members and they will be shared in our newsletter later this week.

I’ve included short video demonstrations for several shortcuts shared below. Most of the following shortcuts are available – alongside 160 more – in the MacStories Shortcuts Archive.

Wake Apple TV

This is a simple shortcut that consists of two actions Apple added in iOS 13: ‘Wake Apple TV’ and ‘Show Remote Control’. Once you’ve configured the shortcut to access an Apple TV on the local network, with the tap of a button you’ll be able to wake an Apple TV and instantly display the Remote control UI on an iPhone or iPad. Perfect to start watching TV with controls on your iPhone, and best used as a widget.

Wake Apple TV

Wake an Apple TV on the local network and show the remote control for it on an iOS device. Best used as a widget for fast activation.

Get the shortcut here.

Wake TV and Set Lights

I’ve been using this other Apple TV shortcut nearly every day to wake my Apple TV when my girlfriend and I want to watch a movie or some episodes of our favorite series.

The shortcut, called Wake TV and Set Lights, wakes up my Apple TV and, if it’s after sunset, dims the lights in the bedroom by running a specific HomeKit scene that makes my lights a relaxing shade of dark blue. The shortcut takes about two seconds to run from a widget on my iPhone, but I’ve also assigned it as an automation to run when I tap an NFC sticker on my nightstand.

What’s interesting about this shortcut is the logic behind checking whether or not it’s after sunset. By default, Shortcuts doesn’t come with actions to check the time of day relative to sunrise and sunset. However, because Shortcuts is integrated with the Weather app, it is possible to use the ‘Get Current Weather’ action to get the weather forecast for your current location or any other address; the magic variable returned by the Weather action can be inspected to extract the ‘Sunset Time’ property, which can then be compared against the current time to check if the shortcut is running after sunset. Easy enough.

Comparing local sunset time against the current time of day.

Accessing weather properties with the magic variable inspector.

In terms of checking the weather for your location, my recommendation is to provide the ‘Location’ action with a fixed address rather than the ‘Current Location’ default value. If the action has to fetch your current location, it’ll have to use GPS, which takes a few seconds to run; with a fixed address, the Weather action will instantly retrieve a forecast, which is a nicer experience if you’re always going to run this shortcut at home. Thanks to the new ‘Location’ action in iOS 13, you can tap the parameter to enter a view where you’ll be able to search for any address in Apple Maps’ database – unlike iOS 12, there’s no need to use a separate ‘Street Address’ action first.

The new ‘Location’ action in iOS 13.

Once we have the location and weather forecast for it, it’s all a matter of using Shortcuts’ new conditional block to compare the current date (a default magic variable in the app) against sunset time. To do this, we just need to pick two parameters in the ‘If’ action and choose one of the new operators, the is after one, to see if we’re past sunset when running the shortcut. If the output of the conditional block is true, we can then use the ‘Control My Home’ action to select a specific Home scene to dim the lights.

Full integration with HomeKit in iOS 13.

Dimming the lights is just an example: perhaps you may want to turn off the AC or fan in the room, or make sure all the doors are locked while you’re watching TV at night: you can do all of this with the ‘Control My Home’ action as it brings the full power of the Home app into Shortcuts.

Wake TV and Set Lights

Wake up an Apple TV on the local network and, if it’s past sunset, dim the lights in the room.

Get the shortcut here.

Pause HomePods

Another simple shortcut that shows how automation doesn’t have to be complex to be useful: using a series of ‘Pause’ actions, this shortcut lets you pause multiple HomePods (or AirPlay 2 speakers) in one go, with the press of a button.

Pause all HomePods at once.

To configure the shortcut, you’ll need to insert as many ‘Pause’ actions as you want for all the speakers you want to control. In each action, tap the speaker name parameter, select which one to control, and that’s it. When you run the shortcut, all selected HomePods or speakers will be instantly paused at once.

I built this shortcut because I have three HomePods in my house and I wanted a fast way to pause them all. Previously, I used to rely on invoking AppleScripts on my Mac mini to control iTunes’ audio playback; with iOS 13, all I need is a ‘Pause’ action.

Pause HomePods

Pause all HomePods (or AirPlay 2 speakers) around the house in one go. The shortcut supports adding as many ‘Pause’ actions as necessary for each speaker you want to pause.

Get the shortcut here.

Set Playback Destination and Shuffle Playlist

My girlfriend and I often like to relax at night by dimming the lights in the bedroom and shuffling our favorite playlist via the bedroom HomePod at low volume. Before iOS 12, I created a shortcut to do this using AppleScripts for iTunes (running on my Mac mini server) and HomeKit scenes; now, I can set the playback destination and adjust the volume directly from my iPhone with Shortcuts.

The shortcut is comprised of four actions:

Set Playback Destination

Set Volume

Play Music

Control My Home

Everything is configured via parameters: the HomePod to set as the playback destination device is picked from a list of AirPlay speakers in my home while configuring the shortcut; similarly, you can pre-assign a volume level, a playlist from the Music app, and accessories or scenes to control in HomeKit. When the shortcut runs, it won’t ask to confirm any of these steps again – it’ll just go ahead and execute them, using your actions as a template to control your home.

In theory, this shortcut will become even more flexible once Apple adds the ability to control HomePods directly through Home automation. Still, this type of shortcut is already useful today, particularly when combined with personal automation. I, for instance, have configured this shortcut to run every time I tap my iPhone against an NFC sticker on my nightstand.

Shuffle Playlist on HomePod

Shuffle a playlist on a specific HomePod, with a specific volume level, and dim the lights. The shortcut needs to be configured based on speakers and HomeKit devices in your home.

Get the shortcut here.

Toggl Project Stats

Exclusively for Club MacStories members, I’ve built two new API-based shortcuts for Toggl, the popular time-tracking service. Called ‘Project Stats’ and ‘Project Task Stats’, these shortcuts allow you to check how much time you’ve spent on a specific Toggl project, as well as individual tasks contained in a project.

Here’s what they look like in the Shortcuts app and Siri:

Checking stats for specific Toggl projects with Shortcuts and Siri.

This summer, I’ve used both shortcuts to check on my progress for this review, which I found useful to get a sense of the (massive) scope of the project as time went on. They’re especially nice when used with Siri, as the assistant can respond with statistics returned directly by the Toggl web API.

These shortcuts will be released exclusively for Club MacStories members in a special issue of the MacStories Weekly newsletter later this week.

Apple Podcasts

I’ve built three shortcuts that take advantage of the new Podcasts actions in iOS 13. The first one is called ‘Subscribe to Podcast’ and, as the name suggests, it allows you to quickly subscribe to a new show in the Podcasts app by letting you search the Apple Podcasts directory from Shortcuts.

First, you’ll be asked to enter a podcast name to search for in an ‘Ask for Input’ action, whose output is passed to the ‘Search Podcasts’ action. This action is reminiscent of the existing ‘Search iTunes Store’ and ‘Search App Store’ actions in iOS 12 in that it lets you enter a search term, define what criteria to search by, and filter results by podcast or author name. In my case, I’ve set the search action to return five podcast results filtered by podcast name.

Searching for podcasts in Apple’s catalog.

After querying the Apple Podcasts directory, the shortcut uses the new If block in iOS 13 to check whether search results have any value or not. If they don’t, it means no show was found for the search query, so an error is displayed.

If results were returned, a ‘Choose from List’ action lets you pick one of the shows found in the Apple Podcasts directory. Podcast results are “rich” objects in Shortcuts featuring a title, artwork, and author information, which you can see when presenting the ‘Podcasts’ variable in a list:

Rich results for podcasts.

Once a podcast has been selected, you can use the ‘Subscribe to Podcast’ action to add the show to your library. You don’t have to do anything else: after the new podcast has been added to the library, you’ll see a success message in Shortcuts, and you’ll find the new show in the Podcasts app, waiting for you to start listening. I don’t subscribe to many new shows these days due to personal time constraints, but when I added a couple new entries to my library this summer, I used this shortcut to speed up the process, and it worked well.

My second Podcasts shortcut is a picker to resume (or start listening to) an episode without opening the Podcasts app at all. At the beginning of the shortcut, the ‘Set Playback Destination’ action is used to select the audio output device.

Selecting a playback output device in Shortcuts.

Building a picker around Podcasts is easy enough: first, we can use ‘Get Podcasts from Library’ to retrieve a list of all the shows the user is currently subscribed to in the Podcasts app (including those based on an RSS feed instead of iTunes); then, we can use ‘Choose from List’ to pick one of the shows from the app’s library. Once the shortcut has a single podcast from the Podcasts app to deal with, we can pass the ‘Selected Item’ magic variable to the ‘Get Episodes of Podcast’ action, which will return a second list – this time, a list of individual episodes for the selected podcast. It may take a few seconds for the shortcut to assemble a list of recent episodes for a show (in my tests, it appears the app loads the 10 most recent episodes from the Apple Podcasts directory), but once that’s done, you can implement a second ‘Choose from List’ action to pick an episode you want to listen to.

Picking and playing a podcast episode from Shortcuts.

At this point, all that Shortcuts needs is a ‘Play Podcast’ action that uses the second ‘Selected Item’ (the episode) to start playing audio on the chosen output device. If you select an episode you had previously started listening to in the Podcasts app, Shortcuts will even resume playback where you left off.

The third and final Podcasts shortcut is called ‘Play Random Podcast Episode’ and, as the name implies, it’s a fun one that plays a random episode for a random podcast currently in your library.

Playing a random podcast episode.

The shortcut relies on the ‘Get Item from List’ action with a ‘Random’ property to randomize results returned by the ‘Get Podcasts from Library’ and ‘Get Episodes of Podcast’ actions. Due to how Apple implemented these actions, it’s not possible to retrieve episodes that haven’t been played yet – Shortcuts will pick a random episode among the 10 most recent ones published by a random podcast in your library. This is a fun shortcut to use if you’re stuck deciding what to listen to and would like to try something different.

You can download my Apple Podcasts shortcuts below.

Podcast Episodes

Start playing an episode from a podcast in the user’s Podcasts library. The shortcut allows you to customize the playback destination.

Get the shortcut here.

Subscribe to Podcast

Search and subscribe to a new show in Apple’s Podcasts app. The new show will be added to your library.

Get the shortcut here.

Play Random Podcast Episode

Play a random episode for a random podcast in your Podcasts app library.

Get the shortcut here.

Safari Reader Article to Mail

This shortcut takes advantage of the new ability in iOS 13 to extract text and other properties of articles on the web using Safari Reader. Once you’ve found an article you want to share in its entirety with someone over email, you can run this shortcut, which will assemble a nicely formatted (rich text) version of the article in a Mail compose window, ready for you to share with someone.

Sharing Reader-formatted articles with Mail.

There are two ways to run this shortcut: if you’re in Safari and have come across an article to share, you can invoke the shortcut from the share sheet and run it inside the browser, as shown in the video above. Otherwise, you can run the shortcut from the app or widget by copying a link to a valid article first.

A link to an article has been turned into Reader-powered rich text.

In either case, the Mail composer will display a formatted version of the story (including links and images); as a nice touch, I modified the subject field of the message so that, by default, it’ll include the name of the author and title of the article. Obviously, you can modify this behavior by adjusting the parameters included in the final ‘Send Email’ action.

Safari Reader Article to Mail

Share an article from Safari via Mail with a clean presentation powered by Safari Reader. You can also run the shortcut from a widget or the Shortcuts app by copying an article’s URL first.

Get the shortcut here.

Convert Historical Currencies

Originally shared in Issue 113 of our MacStories Weekly newsletter for Club MacStories members, this shortcut has been updated for iOS 13 with support for the latest actions and, once iOS 13.1 launches, conversational mode in Siri. Based on the Fixer.io API, the shortcut can convert between currencies for any date in the past, using historical currency conversion rates that are not available via regular Siri currency conversions or by using PCalc’s ‘Convert Value’ action.

Historical currency conversion rates with Shortcuts and Siri.

As you can see from the video above, thanks to integration with Siri and conversational shortcuts, you’ll be able to choose from a list of currencies or specify dates using natural language: instead of replying with ‘USD’ when asked which currency to convert, you can say “the first one”; when Siri asks you to pick a date, you can respond with a specific date, but you can also give Siri a relative date such as “two months ago” or “last Friday”, and it’ll know how to pass that along to the shortcut.

Fetching historical currency conversion rates has always been a problem I’ve tried to solve over the years by using different apps or automations. For the first time thanks to iOS 13.1 and Shortcuts, I can ask Siri to convert any amount for any currency for any date in the past, which is the best version of this shortcut I’ve ever had on my iPhone and iPad.

This shortcut will be released exclusively for Club MacStories members in a special issue of the MacStories Weekly newsletter later this week.

Choose and Toggle Alarm

Thanks to the new ‘Get All Alarms’ action in Shortcuts for iOS 13, it is now possible to get a list of all your alarms already configured in the Clock app. With this shortcut, which also works as a widget, you can choose one among your alarms from the Clock app and turn it on.

Toggling alarms with Shortcuts.

Unfortunately, due to a bug in the Shortcuts app, it is not possible to enable ‘Bedtime’ alarms yet – only traditional timed alarms are supported at the moment (the shortcut will give you an error if you select a ‘Bedtime’ alarm). It’s a small detail, but I’m quite proud of how the shortcut uses the ‘Alarm’ magic variable and reformats its date so that only the alarm’s time (instead of the full creation date) is presented in a success message at the end.

You can turn on an existing alarm with a shortcut in iOS 13.

The shortcut fully supports conversational mode in Siri, and it’s an ideal candidate for automation with NFC stickers attached to your nightstand.

Choose and Turn On Alarm

Choose one of your existing alarms from the Clock app and turn it on.

Get the shortcut here.

Backup Drafts Workspace

Built exclusively for Club MacStories members, this shortcut uses new actions in Drafts 15, the latest update to the app for iOS 13, to query a specific workspace and back up its contents in two different ways to either iCloud Drive or Files.

Backing up a workspace from Drafts 15.

Given a workspace that contains notes formatted in Markdown, the shortcut will first compile them all to a single .md file and export them to a location of your choice. Additionally, the shortcut will iterate over each note contained in the workspace and back it up as an individual file. While I was writing the first half of the review in Drafts this summer, I relied on this shortcut to have continuous backups of it; I would like to see all third-party text editors adopt similar shortcuts to query their libraries and export files using the Shortcuts app.

This shortcut will be released exclusively for Club MacStories members in a special issue of the MacStories Weekly newsletter later this week.

LookUp Definition

This shortcut relies on actions offered by LookUp 6.0, the latest version of the popular dictionary app that has received a major update for iOS 13. Using the ‘LookUp Words’ action from the LookUp app, the shortcut lets you enter a word and choose what part of the definition you want to get.

Getting definitions with LookUp inside Shortcuts.

LookUp lets you retrieve the following definitions for words found in its extensive database:

Meaning

Origin

Example sentences

Opposites

Similar words

Wikipedia

Rhyming words

When the shortcut runs inside the Shortcuts app, it lets you type a word and pick a definition type from a visual LookUp action. In iOS 13.1, however, you’ll be able to unlock a conversational mode that lets you go back and forth with Siri so you can speak a word and choose a definition type without ever touching the screen.

Here’s what it looks like in action:

Looking up word definitions from the LookUp app in Shortcuts.

I had to include a screenshot of LookUp’s main screen because it looks so good.

At the end of the shortcut, you can choose whether or not you want to save the word into one of your existing LookUp collections. This is also a new action in LookUp 6.0 that supports parameters for words and collections; in my shortcut, you’ll be able to pick a collection at runtime by choosing from a list in either the Shortcuts app or Siri.

LookUp Definition

Look up a word definition using LookUp 6.0. The shortcut lets you choose among different definition types, and it can also add a word to a collection.

Get the shortcut here.

Space Images

This is a fun new shortcut I’ve built this year for Club MacStories members: using NASA’s open web APIs, I’ve been able to integrate Shortcuts with the agency’s Astronomy Picture of the Day API, which – you guessed it – returns a different, beautiful space photo every day. But I’ve also gone beyond that by building support for conversational mode (both in the Shortcuts app as well as Siri in iOS 13.1) with the ability to get a description of the photo and the option to save an HD version to the Photos app. Here’s what it looks like:

Fetching NASA’s picture of the day with Shortcuts.

As shown in the video, you can run the shortcut from the Shortcuts app, where you’ll be able to interact with menus and read a description of the photo of the day, but you can also use it with Siri and listen to the assistant as it reads a portion of NASA’s description of a photo.

This shortcut always returns beautiful photos thanks to NASA’s open API.

Ideally, you should be able to download a photo from NASA’s servers and set it as your wallpaper; however, the ‘Set Wallpaper’ action that debuted with the iOS 13 beta in June has since been removed, and it’s unclear whether it’ll be coming back or not. Still, even without the wallpaper function, I’ve enjoyed asking Siri to fetch me a different NASA photo every day.

This shortcut will be released exclusively for Club MacStories members in a special issue of the MacStories Weekly newsletter later this week.

What’s Still Missing from Shortcuts

Back in May, in the section of my Beyond the Tablet story titled ‘The Problems with Shortcuts’, I outlined a series of improvements I wanted to see come to the app in iOS 13. Of those 10 wishes, Apple delivered on 4 of them in iOS 13 – arguably, the toughest ones. After having used the new Shortcuts app for the past three months, I’ve gone through that list again and picked the issues that still annoy me the most. Plus, I’ve added some new entries based on my experience with iOS 13.

Folders. I know that Apple is aware of the need for heavy Shortcuts users to organize their shortcuts in folders, and I can’t believe they still haven’t added this functionality to the app. In May, I theorized that Apple may go for something more innovative than plain folders for shortcut organization. Whatever their solution may be, I just hope it comes at some point during the iOS 13 cycle; I can’t stand having to find my shortcuts via search anymore.

Quick Look support in Siri. I also requested this feature back in May, and I was surprised to see it didn’t make it into iOS 13.1 despite conversational shortcuts. The ‘Quick Look’ action should be bridged to Siri when a custom shortcut is running within the context of the assistant. Scriptable’s leading the way here with its Quick Look-Siri integration, which can present images, documents, videos (!), and even HTML content (!!) inside Siri. At the very least, Apple should match Simon Støvring’s app here.

Deeper Files integration. Another of my requests from May involved Shortcuts’ integration with the Files app. In iOS 13, Shortcuts is still limited to writing files to and reading them from its own document storage located under iCloud Drive/Shortcuts; if you want to access files from other apps, you have to show a document picker and select them manually every time. I’d love to see Apple support the bookmarks technology that allows apps such Scriptable and Working Copy to access documents stored in other apps’ containers; if third-party developers are doing it, there’s no reason Shortcuts shouldn’t integrate with an existing, open API that makes file management on iOS faster and more customizable. It’s time for Shortcuts to go beyond its document sandbox.

More triggers for automation. iOS 13.1 hasn’t even come out yet, and here I am, already complaining about the lack of certain triggers for personal automation. In addition to the ability to run shortcuts when a Bluetooth device connects or an app opens, I would have liked to see the opposite too: when a specific device is disconnected, and when an app is closed (I would use the latter to automate my time-tracking setup). In the future, I’d also like to see third-party triggers for events happening inside apps, but I’ll save this one for next year’s wish list.

Different sets of widgets between devices. Now that the iPad comes with a revamped Home screen with pinned widgets (more in the next chapter), I realize that there are certain widget shortcuts I prefer to have handy on my iPhone, and others that are better suited for work on the iPad. Because of how iCloud sync has been implemented in Shortcuts though, you can only keep one set of widget shortcuts enabled across all your devices. In the future, I’d like the option to keep my widgets separate between the iPhone and iPad.

Better actions for Apple apps. Apple didn’t take iOS 13 as an opportunity to update their Shortcuts actions for new features of certain apps that already integrate with it. For instance, the Reminders actions in Shortcuts do not support subtasks, attachments, or the new URL field of Reminders in iOS 13; Notes actions do not support rich text or attachments; you can’t automate downloading files with Safari. Hopefully, now that Shortcuts offers a flexible parameter API, different teams at Apple will be able to build integrations with new features of their apps more easily than before.

Proper debug tools. Lastly, I realize that this is probably low on Apple’s list of priorities given the need to focus on features with a wider appeal, but for those of us who spend hours creating complex shortcuts, it’d be great to have real debug tools inside the editor for testing long chains of actions. I shouldn’t have to drag in a ‘Show Alert’ action every time I want to double-check the output of a previous action; there should just be a simple ‘Inspect’ button to pause the editor when it reaches a specific action, so you can see what will be passed on to the next action (Editorial used to offer something similar). Furthermore, I’d like to see gestures to insert actions above or below the currently selected one; along the same lines, it’d be fantastic to be able to fold blocks of actions to make it easier to scroll shortcuts, such as Apple Music Wrapped, that span hundreds of actions. If Apple were to ever consider an “expert mode” for Shortcuts, debug tools would be a great fit for it.

A New Shortcuts Era

Last year, I called Shortcuts one of Apple’s most ambitious software bets in years, and I stand by that. With the unification of shortcuts in iOS 13, a new API for apps, a variety of new actions, and conversational mode coming in iOS 13.1 alongside automations, Shortcuts isn’t just a centralized dashboard for automation and Siri personalization. Shortcuts has now fully eclipsed Automator – its original source of inspiration – to become something else entirely: a visual programming language that doesn’t behave or feel like traditional programming at all; a playground where apps become features that talk to each other; a creation tool that lets users customize their Siri experience and, effectively, write their own pieces of software. The Mac never had anything like Shortcuts; no other company can currently aspire to ship anything remotely close to Shortcuts’ platform integrations and app ecosystem.

As Apple has seemingly come to terms with using the word “automation” in Shortcuts, a new vision is laid forth: that beyond a niche of loyal pro users, Shortcuts’ automation model can extend to HomeKit; that it can assist users in their daily routines as well as people with specific accessibility needs; that more than ever, the future of Siri’s integration with apps lies within Shortcuts.

In a software update packed with new features and modernized apps, Shortcuts’ sheer brilliance stands alone, an ambition boldly executed by Apple, proudly presented to users in its best form yet.

iPadOS

For as long as iOS has born its name, the iPad has shared the platform’s spotlight with the iPhone. Over the course of (nearly) a decade, both devices have advanced in lockstep, with iOS evolving to accomodate the unique needs of each. This isn’t changing with iPadOS 13, but Apple is ready to acknowledge a reality that’s been apparent since iOS 9 and the original iPad Pro: while the underlying platform may be the same, the iPad is marching forward at a different pace, advancing on a more deliberate schedule, and tackling problems that don’t affect the iPhone at all.

On a superficial analysis, splitting iOS and iPadOS into distinct entities carries the aftertaste of a pure marketing play from Apple. After all, the iPhone and iPad were always two branches of the same tree: united at their roots, yet extending in different directions. By design, the iPad was always similar enough to the iPhone to feel like a familiar experience for newcomers, but also differentiated to take advantage of interactions on a larger screen. This design philosophy was true with iPhone OS 3.2 – a fork of iPhone OS that launched on the original iPad – and it worked with iOS 9 and iOS 11, when the iPad gained functionalities such as Split View, Slide Over, and drag and drop. Despite its unique traits, the iPad still ran iOS and shared key technologies with the iPhone and the rest of Apple’s ecosystem. For this reason, some might argue that slapping an “iPadOS” monicker on what was already an optimized version of iOS is just semantics at this point.

Here lies the core of Apple’s proposition with iOS and iPadOS though: semantics matter. Even if iPadOS is “just a name”, it means something. And taken at face value, iPadOS is exactly what its name implies: a literal expression of the fact that the iPad experience has become sufficiently distinct from the iPhone to justify having its own brand. Considered through the lens of Apple’s growing ecosystem, it’s not a surprising move: just like watchOS, tvOS, and CarPlay are iOS-based systems with their own design guidelines and feature sets, so does the iPad deserve a name of its own too. If anything, my only criticism is that Apple should have introduced this rebrand years ago.

As a name, “iPadOS” is merely stating the obvious; as an idea, however, the decision to draw a line in the ecosystem with iPadOS seems to imply major changes afoot for the iPad’s software growth.

First and foremost, iPadOS signifies a renewed commitment to a device that has often acted as a sidekick to the iPhone; a revamped hardware lineup followed by an OS rebrand feels like a strong message of hope from a company that’s been inconsistent at best with its iPad-focused software updates. Particularly given how “great hardware, lackluster software” has been a common refrain regarding every new iPad model since the iPad Pro’s debut in 2015.

Furthermore, by separating iOS and iPadOS as distinct platform names, Apple may have more freedom to release iPad-specific features without the looming presence of iOS: if the plan is to take the iPad in a new direction from the iPhone, it’d make sense to put a different label on such an endeavor.

The first fruits of this labor are already showing in iPadOS 13: more than ever, Apple seems fine with designing features that only iPad power users will discover and master over time, from advanced gestures to new multitasking controls. Along the same lines, iPadOS proves Apple’s acceptance of the fact that the Mac figured out how to solve certain problems decades ago: whether it involves multiple app windows, a desktop-class web browser, or access to USB accessories in Files, iPadOS is a first step toward a hybrid computing environment that has outgrown its iOS origins to become something else entirely.

But are these features enough to let the iPad’s software feel as advanced as its hardware? And how far can Apple take iPadOS without betraying the iPad’s intuitive, nimble nature?

New Home Screen

iPadOS’ first order of business was to bring a visual and functional refresh to one of iOS’ sacred locations: the Home screen. For the first time in the iPad’s history, you can now choose to display more apps on a single screen by making their icons smaller; in doing so, you’ll have the option to access widgets from a side of the Home screen itself without opening a separate Today view. When the Today view is shown on the Home screen, the current date and time are also displayed more prominently on top of it, giving the iPad’s Home screen a fresh, modernized look that feels less like a simplistic collection of apps and more like a dashboard.

The new iPad Home screen.

For years, I’ve wondered whether Apple should have taken a clue from Android and allowed iPad users to freely intermix app icons and widgets on the Home screen, enabling the creation of custom layouts to go beyond the app icon grid. The approach chosen by Apple in iPadOS is different: the Today view (which used to be a standalone page) is now a column on the left side of the Home screen, which can only be displayed simultaneously with app icons (on the first page of the Home screen) while in landscape mode; if you’re using the iPad in portrait mode, the Today column disappears and can only be invoked as a modal view with a swipe from the left edge of the display.

The portrait Home screen on the 11-inch iPad Pro.

Additionally, widgets cannot be placed elsewhere: the Home screen, even though it can be denser than before, is still based on a grid layout strictly reserved for icons; widgets have to be contained in the Today column. As was the case with the old Home screen, widgets can be expanded or collapsed to a compact layout if you want to see less information inside them. Old limitations still apply: widgets can’t display a system keyboard and only a small amount of memory is allocated to them, so don’t expect complex interactions to take place inside a widget.

In rethinking widgets as an integral component of the iPad Home screen, Apple brought a new layer of organization to the Today view in iPadOS 13. Widgets can have two separate levels of importance: your “favorites” are all the widgets you choose to enable on your iPad, but “pinned favorites” are the ones that are always shown on the Home screen next to app icons; they sit above favorites in the Today view. To go beyond pinned favorites to see all the other widgets you’ve installed, you have to swipe vertically on the Today view: doing so will reveal additional widgets with a pleasant 3D accordion-like transition that gives a sense of depth to your installed widgets, letting you easily scroll through them.

Scrolling widgets in iPadOS 13.

Pinned widgets in compact mode.

Both pinned and favorite widgets in compact mode.

The UI to pin and organize widgets (which can be accessed from the ‘Edit’ button at the bottom of the widgets list) reflects the structural changes of iPadOS 13, with separate groups for pinned favorites and favorites reminiscent of sections in the new share sheet.

The new interface to configure widgets.

This screen also reveals the ability to use a tighter app grid without seeing the Today view at all times: if you disable the ‘Keep on Home Screen’ setting, go back to the Home screen, and swipe to the left on the first page, the Today view will disappear, icons will expand, and you’ll end up with a denser Home screen without widgets.24

You can hide widgets on the Home screen.

The tighter iPad Home screen without widgets.

By granting the ability to disable persistent widgets altogether, it appears that Apple wanted to strike a balance between providing power users with new options and keeping the iPad’s classic simplicity for those who don’t need more advanced modes. This flexibility – which, as we’ll see shortly, permeates nearly every aspect of iPadOS 13 – has resulted in the option to completely ignore the denser icon grid and revert to the iPad’s bigger Home screen layout.

In Settings ⇾ Display & Brightness ⇾ App Icon Size, you’ll see two options for ‘More’ and ‘Bigger’ Home screen layouts. The former uses smaller app icons to form a 6x5 grid that lets you keep 30 apps on a single screen; the ‘Bigger’ option, which does not support widgets on the Home screen in landscape mode, switches to larger icons and alternates between a 5x4 or 4x5 grid (depending on orientation) to put 20 icons on the Home screen.

Back to the big icons.

Aside from visual preferences, there’s another distinction to be made about the two icon layouts: unlike the old grid, the tighter 30-icon grid has a permanent 6x5 arrangement that rotates across landscape and portrait without switching the position of your icons. Ever since the original iPad, the automatic reflowing of app icons has been one of the most annoying aspects of the experience: the whole point of the Home screen is to build a launcher where your favorite apps are in a predictable, consistent spot; the old iPad Home screen prevented that due to device rotation and the old grid design. The new grid option, which Apple rightly treats as default, ticks all the boxes: it supports widgets in landscape, allows for more icons on a single screen, and doesn’t force icons to reflow when the iPad’s orientation changes. For me, this is an ideal Home screen structure on the iPad; if you’re skeptical today, I recommend playing around with it for a few days.

Quick Actions

There’s more to app icons in iPadOS 13 than their size and placement. Keeping with the idea of enabling interactions that were exclusive to iPhones with 3D Touch, Apple has brought quick actions for app icons to the iPad Home screen in iPadOS 13.

Quick actions on the iPadOS 13 Home screen.

Modeled after the same design and physics of context menus, quick actions appear after long-pressing an icon; they integrate with the special “widgets” of document-based apps, so both elements can be displayed onscreen at the same time after a long-press; and, both on iPhone and iPad this year, quick actions contain a new option to rearrange apps on the Home screen.

Quick actions on the Home screen.

Let’s start from the feature available on all iOS devices as it may help explain the challenges Apple faced with quick actions and the long-press gesture. As I’ve noted with context menus, one of the common criticisms of iOS 11 was Apple’s reliance on long-press gestures that required fine precision from users to know the differences between a short press and a longer press. Personally, I think power users could figure out multitasking gestures with some trial and error; I’d argue that the feature that suffered most because of iOS 11’s gesture design was wiggling mode on the iPad Home screen. Everybody needs to enter wiggling mode sooner or later; however, due to iOS 11’s implementation of long presses to drag app icons into multitasking, wiggling mode became harder to access. Ever since iOS 11, the iPad Home screen has dealt with two different layers of icon-dragging – multitasking and wiggling mode – and I can see how the average iPad user may have struggled reconciling them. But how can two distinct interactions based on the same long-press gesture be visually communicated without cluttering the Home screen with buttons or tooltips?

Apple’s answer in iOS and iPadOS 13 is going all-in with context menus and their Home screen variation, quick actions. These are not new on iPhone, but they replace the previous 3D Touch implementation and have a refreshed design that’s consistent with context menus on all devices.

Quick actions have a separator at the bottom that divides app-related actions from the system’s ‘Rearrange Apps’ button; on iPad, an additional ‘Show All Windows’ button is one of the ways you can access the Exposé functionality of multiwindow. The action to rearrange apps is Apple’s best shot at easing the learning curve of long-press gestures on the Home screen: by default, a long press now reveals quick actions; if you want to rearrange your icons, you can tap a button to enter wiggling mode.

The new Home screen quick actions, featuring a button to enter wiggling mode.

It’s still possible to enter wiggling mode the traditional way by holding down an app icon for ~3 seconds. Additionally, dragging an icon in iOS and iPadOS 13 immediately activates wiggling mode.

This leaves us with an obvious question: what about drag and drop? The answer: quick actions behave like context menus insofar as you can either start dragging right after initiating a long-press or tear the actions menu away to continue dragging the icon. The interaction is especially nice once you realize how you can long-press an icon, scroll through its actions without lifting your finger off the screen, then decide to drag the icon away in one seamless motion.

From quick actions to drag and drop.

Adding Icons to Multitasking

You can still add apps to multitasking from the iPad Home screen: unlike iOS 12, however, you can’t drag an icon and tap another app’s icon to launch it; since dragging an app icon immediately enters wiggling mode in iPadOS 13, selecting a second app simply adds its icon to your drag stack.

To bring an app into multitasking (Split View or Slide Over) from the Home screen in iPadOS 13, you have to drag its icon, enter the app switcher by swiping on the Home indicator, select a space, then drop the icon. It’s a more involved process than before, but at least this feature is still supported.

I’ll be honest: it’s hard for me say whether iPadOS’ revamped long-press gestures on the Home screen are a clear-cut improvement over iOS 11 because I don’t use an iPad like most people. It is my job to know the intricacies of advanced gestures, and I’ve grown to master the fine differences between long and longer presses in the two years that drag and drop has been available on iPad. But I’ll say this: iOS’ long-press gesture has never been as consistent and reliable as it is this year with context menus, which have been designed with all kinds of devices in mind. As an extension of context menus, quick actions blend the benefits of 3D Touch with the simplicity of a long-press gesture, and in the process have brought a welcome sense of order to the iPad’s Home screen.

Ultimately, both context menus and quick actions are opinionated design choices: Apple believes that a long-press should quickly display a menu in iOS and iPadOS 13, which can optionally be dragged away; everything else (wiggling mode, drag and drop for multitasking) is a subset of that. Having used the iPad Home screen for the past three months, I find myself increasingly nodding in agreement.

There’s a thought I keep going back to regarding the new Home screen in iPadOS 13: I would have liked to see more substantial changes, but what we got has been enough to make me appreciate and use the Home screen more.

In many ways, the Home screen is the identity of an iPhone and iPad – the launchpad for experiences represented by app icons. Bringing drastic changes to a formula that has worked well for over a decade may be too dangerous a risk even for Apple, a company that’s not new to introducing changes that feel ahead of their time (until they’re the new industry norm). In this case, the iPad Home screen is still missing key features that would propel it forward for power users: there should be a way to create fully custom icon layouts, with blank spots, going beyond the constraints of a grid; I’d like to see document bookmarks, or perhaps even app shortcuts, become elements that can be pinned directly to the Home screen; advanced users should have the option of freely intermixing icons and widgets within a page; it should be possible to navigate the Home screen and select apps from an external keyboard. Arguably, such advanced features shouldn’t be enabled by default for all users; however, for those who seek more power, iPadOS should make that power available to them through deeper customization options. Frankly, I’m surprised that all Apple was able to come up with in the two years since iOS 11 was a sidebar for widgets and quick actions.

One of my most used quick action menus is the Reminders one. I use it to view Reminders windows and open specific lists. (The wallpaper is exclusive to Club MacStories members.)

That’s not to say I’m not enjoying the new Home screen features in iPadOS 13. Quick actions have greatly simplified how I can access specific sections of apps (such as my favorite subreddits in Apollo), create tasks in specific Reminders lists, or check for updates on the App Store. I’m still getting used to them, and they’ve yet to become a second-nature interaction like 3D Touch on my iPhone XS Max, but I think I’ll get there as more iPad apps start supporting them.

The Today column for widgets has been a terrific addition in terms of running shortcuts from the Home screen: while I could already run my favorite widget shortcuts from iOS 12’s Today page, the extra swipe required to open widgets added friction to the experience. That’s gone with widgets on the Home screen: now whenever I need to convert between units, check time zones, or activate a HomeKit scene, shortcuts to perform those tasks are only a tap away. The Today column has increased my usage of Shortcuts’ widgets, but it’s also pushed me to reconsider third-party ones. After much experimentation, I’ve landed on Shortcuts and Timery as my pinned favorites (with Timery in compact mode so I can always see both widgets at the same time), plus Reminders and CARROT Weather in my favorites. This setup works well for me as it puts frequently used shortcuts plus time-tracking actions and stats directly on the Home screen, allowing me to jump back into a specific workspace and start a related timer in seconds.

Even though I was hoping for more, the iPad Home screen is growing up, and that’s a good sign. Apple has been relatively conservative with its Home screen alterations in iPadOS 13; multitasking, on the other hand, is a completely different story.

Multitasking and Multiwindow

If iOS 11 felt like a reintroduction of the iPad, inspired by the Mac’s best traits, iPadOS 13 is an addendum to that vision – the latest installment of Apple’s rethinking of classic Mac features for the age of touch. After adapting split-screen multitasking to iPad with iOS 9 and leveraging drag and drop as a multitasking facilitator in iOS 11, this year Apple set its sights on multiwindowing. And in the process, they’ve fundamentally rethought what it means to use an iPad app and what users should expect from multitasking on a tablet.

I’ve argued on several occasions before that one of the reasons the iPad found incredible success in its first two years of life was its close resemblance to the iPhone. There was an App Store where users could safely download thousands of apps, but using them didn’t require the dexterity necessary to operate multiple windows on a Mac. As a result, the iPad, just like the iPhone before, could dynamically transform into whatever app you were running at any given moment, be it a book, a newspaper, or a word processor. That design decision, or perhaps technological limitation presented under a veneer of designer intention, set expectations accordingly: the iPad was no land for old Mac features. The iPad shed the Mac’s complexity in favor of the iPhone’s simplicity and projected that on a bigger screen – and people loved it.

Those days have long been gone, but not because Apple disowned the iPad’s original idea of striving to be a computer for everyone. In fact, both iOS 9 and iOS 11 were attempts to broaden the scope of the iPad as a computer for the masses by catering to a different portion of the audience: those who, after all, wanted to elect an iPad as their primary computer and wouldn’t mind – actually, they craved – an additional layer of moderate complexity. It’s debatable whether Apple met everyone’s expectations with iOS 11; however, it’s undeniable how the past four years of iPad have been characterized by Apple’s goal to cater to casual and professional users alike by blending iOS’ ingenuity with the Mac’s cardinal productivity principles.

It’s not surprising then how, in going beyond the tablet by mixing the best traits of two OSes, Apple ended up creating a third one with iPadOS.

While iOS 11 was, in some ways, a departure from iOS 9’s multitasking activation and spatiality, iPadOS 13 keeps iOS 11’s interaction paradigm intact and extends it with the addition of two classic Mac features: Exposé and multiple windows.

Multiple App Windows

The key concept behind iPadOS 13’s multiwindow environment is that you can now open multiple instances of the same app across the system. Apple calls these instances “windows”, like on macOS; even though they don’t actually look like windows on a Mac – there is no underlying desktop and windows can’t overlap with each other (except for Slide Over) – they roughly behave the same way. Windows allow you to open the same document from the same app in multiple locations, or load different pieces of content in separate views of an app, or display the same object with a different presentation across windows. Developers are free to choose what iPadOS’ multiwindowing support can enable, and they can do so using a new scene technology that lets apps spawn these multiple instances, which can be placed anywhere in the system.

iPadOS’ multiwindow abilities fit in squarely with iOS 11’s support for multiple app spaces. Unlike what initial rumors suggested, iPadOS’ app windows are not tabs presented as part of a single app view: windows are, visually and spatially speaking, fully independent views that can be used in full-screen, combined with other apps in Split View, or put in Slide Over (which is also changing in iPadOS, but more on this later).

Apple went all-in on the idea of enabling users to open an unlimited number of app windows, which they can shuffle around, combine with other windows from other apps, and close whenever they want. This model feels like the realization of iOS 11’s design: after multiple Split View spaces, we can now have multiple instances of the same app too. iPadOS 13, however, breaks several assumptions of iPad multitasking, has a learning curve, and requires a longer adjustment period than iOS 11 did.

Multiple Safari windows in iPadOS 13’s main switcher.

To ease users into multiwindowing, Apple chose to piggyback on iOS 11’s drag and drop-based multitasking and build support for different ways to create app windows. At a high level, anything that can be dragged in iPadOS can become its own window. In iOS 11, drag and drop could either be used to drag app icons and turn them into windows or to pick up content from an app and move it into another; in iPadOS 13, the lines between these two modes have been blurred so that content picked up inside an app can also morph into a window if dropped in the correct location.

As far as creating windows via drag and drop goes, there are three ways to do it:

When you’re holding an item that can become a window, you can drop it on either side of the screen to create a Split View or open the window in Slide Over;

Alternatively – and this is a new feature in iPadOS 13 – you can drop the item around the top edge of the screen to instantly create a new full-screen window that takes over the current frontmost app;

The top-edge method also works for existing windows in Split View or Slide Over, which makes it possible to “destroy” a Split View space by picking up one of the participating apps and converting it to its own full-screen space.

As always, this is easier to explain with a video:

Creating new windows with drag and drop.

The first layer of complexity in this new system involves determining whether an item that’s being dragged can become a standalone app window or not. For now, the only solution is trial and error: there’s no immediate visual differentiation between drag items that are “just content” (e.g. a paragraph of text) and those that can spawn a window; the only way to know is to try dropping an item to the side of the screen to see if it brings up a new window tile. If the drag item gains an app icon and morphs into a larger object, you’re about to create a window; otherwise, that item can only be dropped as content into another app.

If you start dragging a link in Safari, it looks like a regular drag item at first.

Move it toward the edge of the screen, however, and it’ll become a new window tile.

Another way to learn which items can become windows, I suppose, is through the common sense Apple’s hoping users will apply. For example:

In the Notes app, folders and individual notes can be dropped elsewhere as new windows (makes sense!), but you can’t create a window from a paragraph of text;

In Reminders, you can pick up a list from the sidebar and create a separate window for it with drag and drop, but you can’t turn a single reminder into a window;25

In Mail, the composer and individual messages can be turned into windows, but not mailboxes or folders;

Safari, of course, lets you create windows from tabs and links dragged from a webpage, but because it is the system browser, any link from any app (Messages, Mail, Twitter, etc.) can also be dragged to become a new Safari window.26

There’s a certain degree of inconsistency in how different Apple apps mark objects and views as eligible for multiwindow; my recommendation is to just try and see if drag and drop meets your expectations.

If an app supports the proper API, you can also drag notifications and let them become new windows in iPadOS 13. To test this functionality, try with notifications from the Messages app.

Third-party developers have been allowed to run free with drag and drop window activation as well, and it’s no surprise that early iPadOS 13 app updates closely mimic the experience in Apple’s own apps. In the latest version of Drafts, Greg Pierce’s note-taking app, you can pick up a note from any workspace and drop it on either side of the screen, or perhaps along the top edge of the iPad’s display, to create a new window. When I was using Drafts to write parts of this review (because iA Writer didn’t have iOS 13 compatibility yet), I took advantage of multiwindow to keep notes for different chapters in multiple windows.

Drafts’ latest version supports multiwindow on iPadOS.

Similarly, Working Copy, the git client by Anders Borum, can now open multiple windows for files and repositories by dropping them elsewhere onscreen.

Opening multiple repositories as separate windows with Working Copy.

Fortunately, drag and drop is only one of the ways to engage multiwindow in iPadOS 13. The second path to creating multiple windows, and one that I believe will turn out to be popular among users, is through context menus. Both Safari and Files, for instance, provide a context menu button labeled ‘Open in New Window’ to open webpages and folders in separate instances of those respective apps.

Files’ context menu has a button to open a selected folder in a new window.

When a window is opened via a context menu rather than drag and drop, iPadOS 13 defaults to opening it in Split View (within the current space) with a 50/50 layout. If the current space is already running in Split View, the new window replaces one of the two existing apps, which gets booted off to its own space. Personally, even though it’s more limited than drag and drop as you can’t decide where to drop a new window and what size it’ll be, I prefer this activation method because it’s labeled with a button in a native UI element. The interaction is obvious and communicated clearly to the user.

Opening new windows with context menus.

Third-party developers can embed buttons to open windows in context menus as well. One of the best examples I’ve seen so far is LookUp 6.0: in addition to an amazing new quiz mode, the app’s latest version lets you tap and hold collections to open them as standalone windows:

Opening new windows for collections in LookUp 6.0.

Drafts 15 has a similar implementation:

You can preview Markdown notes in separate windows with Drafts 15, and there’s also a context menu to open new windows.

Apps can also embed custom buttons in their interfaces that will spawn new windows. CARROT Weather, the malevolent weather app, now comes with a button to open a weather map overlay in a new window.

Tap the button in CARROT Weather’s map overlay…

…and you’ll be able to check the weather in multiple windows.

For apps that want to support multiwindowing but don’t offer views where neither drag and drop nor context menus are appropriate (because there’s nothing to long-press), it makes sense to use a custom interface element to open a new window instead. New windows opened programmatically by apps with custom buttons follow the same behavior of context menus: the new window opens in Split View on the other side of the screen.

Implementing custom keyboard shortcuts to create new windows is a possibility for developers, too. Things’ iPadOS 13 update, for instance, adds a ⌘⌃N keyboard shortcut to open a new window for the currently selected view.

Open a new window with a keyboard shortcut.

So far, I’ve described the different ways to open app windows in iPadOS 13, but there are different types of windows as well. In iPadOS 13, an app window can be a primary or auxiliary one: a primary window is, effectively, a full instance of an app featuring all its controls and navigation options; an auxiliary window, on the other hand, is intended to display a single object or screen at a time – it’s designed to act as a temporary window for a specific piece of content that will be dismissed in the near future. The distinction between primary and auxiliary windows comes down to the behavior of each individual app; Apple is merely providing developers with guidelines on what should constitute an auxiliary experience in iPadOS’ multiwindow environment.

In Notes and Mail, individual notes and messages open as auxiliary windows when dropped to the side of the screen; you can tell they’re not primary windows because they don’t let you navigate out of the content you’ve opened and only feature a ‘Done’ button in the upper toolbar to close the window.

You can tell a window is an auxiliary one when it features a ‘Done’ or ‘Close’ button and doesn’t let you navigate out of the current view.

Mail also opens messages as auxiliary windows.

However, dragging a Reminders list, Notes folder, or Safari webpage creates primary windows that have all the navigation features you’d expect from the full app. In a way, auxiliary windows are sort of like a glorified Quick Look preview that spawns a separate instance of an app to interact with a single item at a time.

Primary windows feature the full set of controls you’d get in the regular, single-window app.

While I understand the technical motivation behind primary and auxiliary windows, I have a feeling most users are going to expect each window to be a full replica of an app without any limitations attached. I may be wrong, but I don’t think auxiliary windows are going to be used much among third-party apps; I wish there was a setting (or hidden gesture) to always open windows as primary ones without the ‘Done’ button in the upper toolbar.

Exposé

When you open multiple windows on a Mac, in the vast majority of cases they start cluttering your desktop and you end up with multiple overlapping windows, each demanding your attention. Some users rely on multiple spaces to tidy up their window collections, but, anecdotally speaking, I’m assuming that most rely on a mix of manual repositioning and Mission Control/Exposé to view and manage all their open windows. The system Apple created in iPadOS 13 is a blend of iOS 11’s app switcher and a lightweight version of macOS.

In iPadOS 13, the standard app switcher displays all your spaces as before; if an app has multiple windows open, the same app will then appear multiple times in the switcher. However, in order to differentiate between spaces and windows, the switcher now displays a title underneath the name of apps that have multiple instances open. The title helps users discern between multiple windows for the same app; it can be the name of a person for a Messages thread, a domain name in Safari, the title of a note, and so forth.

Apps with multiple windows in the app switcher.

Before iPadOS 13, I often wondered how Apple would solve the confusion inherent to displaying multiple views for the same app in the multitasking switcher; it turns out, they didn’t have a grand plan to fix it at all. The app switcher simply aggregates every full-screen space and Split View that’s currently open across the system, collecting all app windows in one place.

Apple did have something different in mind to filter and manage windows belonging to the same app though: an iPadOS version of Exposé. Think of Exposé as an app switcher dedicated to windows for the same app: just like macOS, Exposé on iPadOS displays a collection of all windows for the selected app, whether they’re currently open in full-screen, Split View, or Slide Over. Like the regular app switcher, you can tap windows to reopen them or flick them upwards to close them.

Exposé for Notes in iPadOS 13.

As with other multiwindow features in iPadOS 13, there are multiple ways to engage Exposé. From the Home screen and dock, you can long-press an icon and tap the ‘Show All Windows’ quick action to load the Exposé view for that app.

‘Show All Windows’ is how you launch Exposé from the Home screen.

Alternatively, if you want to view Exposé for an app you’re currently using in the foreground, you can reveal the dock and tap that app’s icon once to instantly open Exposé. And, when you’re inside the regular multitasking app switcher, you can also tap the icon in the dock for the most recently used app to “apply a filter” to the switcher and turn it into Exposé for that app alone.

Opening Exposé.

Exposé was primarily designed to preview and close existing app windows, not to control them; as I’ll argue later, I believe that’s one of the downsides of iPadOS 13’s multitasking. As a preview system, Exposé is an effective solution to get a bird’s eye view of an individual app’s open windows; now that I’m used to it, I’m particularly fond of the ability to tap an icon in the dock once to reveal Exposé for the app I’m currently using.

Collecting, previewing, and closing app windows isn’t all that Exposé can do in iPadOS 13. First, you can create a new app window from Exposé. There’s a ‘+’ button in the upper right corner that creates a new full-screen (primary) window for the app you’re previewing, which is arguably a faster way to do it than finding an item that can be dragged and dropping it along the top edge of the display. If you want to create multiple primary, full-screen windows for apps, Exposé is the way to go.

Tap the button to create a new full-screen window from Exposé.

Second, Exposé is also used to restore windows you’ve recently closed. Every time you close an app window (whether it’s from Exposé or the main app switcher), you can invoke Exposé and tap the ‘Reopen Closed Window’ button (in the top-right) to restore the window and switch back to it. This undo functionality supports reopening multiple windows at once27 and sticks around until you lock or restart your iPad.

Reopening closed windows from Exposé.

Additionally, a part of Exposé lives within another UI element of iPadOS 13: the window picker that appears when you want to add an app that already has multiple windows open to Split View or Slide Over.

This is the picker you’ll see when adding an app with multiple windows to Slide Over or Split View.

This reveals a problem unique to iPadOS and the way Apple designed its multitasking environment around drag and drop. On the Mac, when you want to multitask with multiple apps or windows, you usually don’t pick up an app and “add it” to a space: you just open a new window, position it somewhere onscreen, and continue working. It’s a different interaction on iPad: because its multitasking system revolves around picking app icons and dropping them either in Slide Over or Split View, what happens if the app represented by the icon has multiple windows already open across the system?

Apple’s answer in iPadOS 13 is that rather than creating a new window every time, or defaulting to the last-used window, you’ll see a third kind of window picker that lets you choose whether you want to bring in an existing window or create a new primary one on the spot. There’s a version of this picker for full-screen windows…

So much room for activities!

…Split View spaces…

…and, of course, Slide Over:

While this interface isn’t officially labeled ‘Exposé’, it serves the same purpose as the real, standalone Exposé – only it doesn’t let you close existing windows. I’m assuming Apple thought this picker would help prevent the creation of too many new windows across the system; in my experience, it has been quite effective at that.

New Slide Over

The last piece of iPadOS’ multiwindow plan is my favorite addition of all: you can now keep multiple apps (and app windows) open in Slide Over and cycle through them with a quick swipe.

Multiple apps in Slide Over.

Like in iOS 11, Slide Over continues to be a layer of the interface shared at a system-wide level – meaning that Slide Over is always available regardless of the space you’re in. However, while in iOS 12 dropping an app icon in Slide Over replaced the existing Slide Over app because only one could be active at a time, iPadOS 13 allows you to keep adding as many apps/windows as you want to Slide Over, which is now a standalone multitasking layer that even has its own app switcher.

Adding multiple apps to Slide Over.

You can add apps to Slide Over as before by dropping an icon (or, this year, a drag item that spawns a window) on top of a full-screen app or over the divider between two apps in Split View. Once you’ve added multiple apps or windows to Slide Over, you can cycle through them by swiping left or right over their Home indicator at the bottom (like you’d flip through a stack of cards); if you need to see all the apps that are currently running in Slide Over, you can swipe up on the Slide Over Home indicator and pause to reveal an app switcher dedicated exclusively to Slide Over where you can flick windows away to close them. The whole system is, effectively, like having the iPhone X’s multitasking switcher built into iPadOS, just for Slide Over.

Managing multiple apps in Slide Over.

In the months I’ve been testing iPadOS, having a set of apps in Slide Over has proven to be a transformative addition to my daily workflow. When I was watching a YouTube live stream about E3, for example, I was able to keep YouTube in full-screen (so I’d have a large video player on the left side of the screen) and move between Twitter and Messages in Slide Over to share reactions with my friends and followers; similarly, when watching session videos from WWDC, I kept the WWDC app and Safari in Split View while flipping between different notes from the Notes app opened as windows in Slide Over.

My typical research setup in iPadOS 13: watching a video, working on a mind map, and flipping between multiple Notes windows in Slide Over.

Having multiple apps in Slide Over is ideal for research workflows that involve switching between different sources or documents to double-check specific information; from this perspective, Slide Over and multiwindow are a perfect match for each other, giving you a fast, omnipresent switcher that supports both different apps and windows and is entirely operated through quick swipes.

This flavor of Slide Over is the best it’s ever been, and it’s the kind of feature that couldn’t exist on the Mac due to the lack of multitouch. I was not expecting Slide Over to mature into its own app switcher for compact apps, but I can already see how it’ll become one of iPadOS 13’s most popular features.

The Complexities of Multiwindow

Multiwindow in iPadOS 13 is an evolution of the multitasking framework of iOS 11; as such, it is heavily influenced by drag and drop and requires a fair amount of eye-hand coordination to tell the differences between various multitasking conditions. As we’ve seen before, not everybody likes this. Multiple windows bring new variables into the fold, and I don’t think Apple has hit the mark on all of them quite yet.

It was impossible to avoid this, but the new features in iPadOS 13 have brought an increase in cognitive load: now in addition to thinking about apps and the spaces they’re in, users may have to account for the state of individual windows, just like on a traditional desktop computer. This was bound to happen the moment Apple decided the iPad should support multiwindow, and I wouldn’t worry about it too much: multiwindow is optional; it’s never forced upon the user as a requirement to get work done; and it’s perfectly fine to keep using an iPad without opening multiple windows. With great power comes great responsibility; if you choose to work with multiple windows, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that you’ll have to manage them too.

There’s an argument to be made, however, regarding how windows are created and the gestures required to operate multitasking and multiwindow in iPadOS 13. If you thought that long-press gestures were overused before, you’re not going to like how iPadOS 13 builds upon iOS 11’s system without substantial alterations. Drag and drop remains the chief method of turning app icons, and now any drag item, into windows; Apple has somewhat improved the timing of the gesture (so it’s more clear when an item has “bounced back” and is ready to be dragged), but the fundamental concern shared by others remains: a long-press on a touchscreen is, by nature, a delayed gesture that requires users to hold their finger, visually assess the state of an icon, then continue. For power users, this is not an issue; for younger users or people with motor disabilities or other physical impairments, the fine gestures employed by Apple continue to be a problem.

It could be easier if Apple allowed you to replace, or at least supplement, these touch interactions with commands issued from an external keyboard – such as the one made by the company itself. But that’s also an area where iPadOS 13 sees no meaningful improvements over iOS 12: neither multitasking nor multiwindow can be operated from a keyboard at all; if you’re working with an iPad Pro connected to a Smart Keyboard Folio and want to create a Split View or manage your open windows from Exposé, you’ll always have to lift your fingers off the keyboard and touch the screen. I understand that Apple may be facing tough challenges with mapping a touch-based environment to external keyboards; however, four years after iOS 9 and the Smart Keyboard’s debut, I have to believe that Apple’s issue is more political than technical; I find it surprising, to say the least, that the company couldn’t figure out how to add an app from Search results to Slide Over or resize a Split View from an external keyboard.

Aside from longstanding limitations that haven’t been fixed yet, my primary concern with multiwindow in iPadOS 13 is that the whole system sometimes feels over-engineered and disorienting. And I wonder if even folks who have used a Mac before, but may be new to the iPad, will actually know how to apply their sense of agency and control iPadOS without reading a manual first.

Consider these numbers, for example: in iPadOS 13, there are five different ways to open windows:

Drag and drop

Context menus

Custom buttons in apps

Exposé

Exposé window picker

There are three different ways to open Exposé:

‘Show All Windows’ button in context menu

By tapping once on the icon for the frontmost app (in the dock)

In the main app switcher, by tapping the icon (in the dock) of the most recently used app

And there are four different app/window pickers:

The main app switcher

The new Slide Over app switcher

Exposé

Exposé window picker

On one hand, I appreciate the flexibility granted by the system, which lets me create and manage windows in a variety of ways. I know how to use these features. On the other though, I wonder if the only reason I can understand the small differences between each of these elements is because it’s my job to do so; I grasp them by writing extensively about them, not because they’re inherently discoverable.

In taking on more serious window-related responsibilities historically exclusive to a Mac, I don’t think Apple struck a perfect balance between the iPad’s simplicity and multiwindow’s complexity yet. The slight visual differences between these UI elements, combined with the precise gestures required to activate them, may result in a steep learning curve for users; I’m not sure what the solution is, but I know how I felt for the first few weeks of using iPadOS 13. That initial confusion took a while to subside.

The sense of disorientation caused by multiwindow can also be ascribed to how the system doesn’t always meet your expectations or fails to communicate sufficient details about the state of windows. For example: let’s say you want to add the Notes app to a Split View, but after dropping its icon on one side of the screen, you’re presented with the window picker to choose whether you want to add an existing window or a new one to the Split View.

Which Notes window do you want to add to Split View?

Now, you wouldn’t know this because the system doesn’t show it, but one of the open Notes windows is already participating in another Split View space elsewhere in the system. Here it is:

There is no label that says “this window is already paired with another app”. If you add that window to the new Split View, the other one will be “destroyed” behind the scenes without you knowing first-hand.

The original Split View has been un-assigned, and now Notes is paired with Music.

iPadOS assumes that you, the user, are mentally keeping track of all windows and their state in spaces scattered throughout the system. The ephemeral nature of spaces was already an issue in iOS 11; it’s now exacerbated by the possibility of overriding an existing space by taking one of its windows and putting it somewhere else. This is not a catastrophe – we’re not talking about data loss here – but it feeds into the idea of lacking a sense of place and direct control over windows.

The visual difference between creating a Split View or Slide Over is still unclear (see this section from two years ago), but my main problem is how iPadOS makes multiwindow and multitasking touch-first affairs except the place where it would make the most sense: the app switcher. Everywhere else in the OS, direct manipulation is used to pick up app icons or windows and drop them to create workspaces for multitasking. But in the one area where all app windows are neatly organized as floating cards begging to be dragged around and managed via touch, it’s impossible to do so.

What’s ironic is that Apple figured this out on the Mac – which has no direct touch control whatsoever – by letting users drag a window on top of another in a space to create a Split View; in iPadOS, where multitouch is the control system for all types of windows, you can’t manipulate or recombine windows from the app switcher.

Split View Focus

In iPadOS 13, Apple has “fixed” one of the most annoying problems of Split View: its lack of communication as to which app was actively in focus and receiving keyboard input.

The quotes are necessary as Apple’s “fix” consists of subtle shading on the pulling indicator at the top of a window: the active app has a slightly darker one.

Can you see it?

It’s a start, I guess, but Apple can do better.

As I’ve argued several times in the past, the ability to create favorite, permanent workspaces could help users not second-guess the decision to drop a window somewhere else at the risk of unpairing a previously created space. Plus, it would just be convenient to have permanent combinations of your favorite apps that you could easily reopen or recreate with one tap. Multiwindow lends itself to the idea of favorite workspaces, but they’re not here yet. I’ve been able to sort of replicate the functionality by creating shortcuts that reopen specific documents or sections of apps, but users shouldn’t have to do this. I keep thinking that favorite spaces would be a fantastic addition to the app switcher for all kinds of users, but Apple seemingly disagrees.

Lastly, I ought to mention how some necessary window controls are missing from iPadOS 13. In the app switcher, despite the fact that windows now feature subtitles that describe their view, you can’t search for windows by name; especially once you have dozens of open windows on your device, it would be helpful to filter them by typing into a search bar.

Due to how multiple app windows can be scattered across the app switcher, flicking an app upwards to close it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re force-quitting the entire app anymore: you may just be closing one of its open instances. There should be a shortcut to close all windows with a couple of taps; to do this right now, you have to reveal Exposé for an app and close each window manually. I wonder if Apple could speed up this interaction for power users.

There’s a single lesson that can be learned from all these criticisms: perhaps there’s only so much you can do to reinvent window management without running into the same problems tech companies – including Apple – have been trying to solve for the past 30 years. Window management in iPadOS isn’t as complex or daunting as it can be on a Mac: I think Apple has done a good job getting rid of superfluous options that wouldn’t make sense for the platform (i.e. traffic light controls, freely resizable windows) and focusing on the core benefits of multiwindow, adapting them to touch. But that’s the issue: no matter how much it’s simplified, made touch-friendly, or slimmed down, it is the very idea of managing multiple app windows that, for some people, is a bridge too far that just doesn’t fit their mental model.

Window management in iPadOS isn’t as complex or daunting as it can be on a Mac.

At some point, it comes down to making compromises for the greater good of the majority of users: there absolutely are productivity benefits to multiwindow, and users who rely on iPads for professional tasks have long been demanding the ability to create multiple instances of apps. If bringing multiwindow means adding a layer of complexity for those who seek it, so be it. The concerns I’ve shared so far involve the implementation of the idea, which I think could be improved, not the idea itself. I appreciate that Apple tried to imagine a computing era without traditional file or window management; I appreciate it even more, however, that the company has faced reality and understood how, as a human species, we still have to come up with a better concept than folders and windows to get work done on our computers.

Ultimately, what matters to me is that Apple is still translating classic computing ideas to the iPad by redesigning and reimagining them for touch – not just by carbon-copying how they work on a Mac. What they’ve done with multiwindow in iPadOS 13 isn’t perfect, and it’s not going to be mastered by everyone; but it’s more than good enough, and it’s the new beginning for iPad multitasking that iPad users deserved.

Other Changes

The updated Home screen and multiwindow alone would justify giving iPad its own branded OS, but there are more iPad-related updates in this release worth covering.

Apple Pencil

I’ve written before about how I don’t use the Apple Pencil for artistic purposes but rely on it to control the iPad’s UI when I’m working with an external display, as well as for the occasional note-taking. For these reasons, the fact that Apple was able to reduce the Pencil’s latency down to 9ms (for both Pencil generations) doesn’t particularly affect me, but it’s noticeable, and it’s a big deal for creative pros who get work done with a Pencil every day.

The Pencil’s latency was already industry-leading, but Apple further optimized performance in the input and graphics stacks and enhanced its prediction algorithms to make drawing feel even smoother and more fluid. The digital ink now sticks so close to the Pencil’s tip, latency is barely visible to the naked eye.

Four years after the Pencil’s introduction with the first iPad Pro, Apple has created a PencilKit framework for developers to incorporate hand-drawn content in their apps. I’ve long argued that this is what Apple should have done to foster an ecosystem of Pencil-compatible apps: rather than forcing developers to write their own drawing engines from scratch – which has a high development cost that incurs a debt to time spent on other features – Apple now lets developers plug directly into the same system that generates drawings for Notes and Markup. Developers get a high-performance, highly tuned, low-latency drawing stack that supports both Apple Pencil and the user’s finger, effectively for free. I expect several note-taking and drawing apps to integrate with this new API in the near future.

The latest version of ShadowDraw implements PencilKit support for sketching in the app.

The big Pencil-related news in iPadOS 13, however, is the new tools palette available for markup mode or when taking screenshots. Tools have been redesigned so they have a more realistic appearance now, which is fun to look at and helps distinguish each individual instrument, especially on the iPhone’s smaller screen (the tools palette has been redesigned everywhere, not just on iPad). The level of opacity selected for each tool is also displayed as a numeric value, which I find easier to understand than a slider.

The new tools palette for Markup.

The tools palette in dark mode.

The eraser tool now lets you choose between a pixel eraser (the standard mode) and an object eraser that deletes entire annotations with one tap; to switch between modes, you need to choose from a menu that’s accessed by tapping the eraser tool. The ruler is also more obviously accessible than before as it’s a top-level instrument in the palette now.

For iPad users, the most significant change is that the palette can be moved around with drag and drop and pinned to any side of the screen or minimized in a corner to prioritize screen real estate.

You can now move the tools palette around and even minimize it.

When minimized, the palette is reduced to a smaller circular element in the corner of the screen that shows the currently selected instrument. When you tap it again to change tools, the palette expands; if you want, you can enable an ‘Auto-minimize’ setting that shrinks the palette as soon as you start drawing onscreen.

As someone who annotates screenshots on a daily basis, I think these enhancements are excellent. But there’s more. If you’re using a Pencil and want to take a screenshot, you can now swipe from the bottom left/right corners of the display, wait for the current screen to be framed, then let go of the Pencil to instantly capture a screenshot. It’s super easy to do:

Capturing screenshots with the Apple Pencil.

Screenshot Snapping

Since iOS 11, the crop tool of the screenshot editing UI has been capable of snapping to the edges of individual apps in Split View, Slide Over, and Picture in Picture. With iPadOS and iOS 13, Apple has enhanced the crop tool so it can now magnetically snap to the individual layout boundaries of an app’s interface.

This is hard to describe or show in video, so try it for yourself: open Notes on your iPad, take a screenshot, and start cropping. Notice how the crop tool will automatically snap to the edge of the Notes sidebar, or the header where it says ‘All iCloud’. Do the same with Mail on your iPhone, for instance, and you’ll see that the crop tool will snap to the edge of the top and bottom toolbars.

I took advantage of this very feature in this review to precisely crop UI elements I wanted to display as images. I commend the Apple engineers who came up with this idea, and I’d love to know how it works behind the scenes (I’m assuming that only certain UIKit elements support the automatic snapping behavior).

You’ll also notice a couple new options regarding the output format of screenshots. First, when dismissing the screenshot UI, you’ll be offered the option of saving the screenshot to Files in addition to Photos. Second, and perhaps more importantly, iPadOS and iOS 13 support a new full-page capture mode that, as the name suggests, allows you to capture the full contents of an app’s page rather than just what’s being displayed onscreen.

For instance, this means you can now capture a full webpage in Safari:

Apps that support full-page capture will offer a new button at the top of the screen in the screenshot editing UI.

Or a full message in Mail, perfect for newsletters:

A full-page capture of a newsletter in Mail.

Full-page captures are automatically saved as PDF documents, which you’ll need to export to Files. Developers can also integrate with the full-page capture API. Here’s MindNode, for instance, with support for full-page capture to let you export a full version of a mind map, including content that isn’t currently displayed:

A full-page capture of my mind map for this story.

Capturing entire webpages in Safari and marking them up with the Pencil before sharing them with someone else on Messages or Slack has become one of my favorite uses of the Pencil. Full-page capture is also a great fit for Safari and research workflows – an area of the iPad experience that Apple has considerably refined this year.

Floating Keyboard

Well, this is an odd one.

If you ever find yourself in a situation where you’d like to display a keyboard onscreen but feel like the default iPad software keyboard is too big, you can now pinch the keyboard (or long-press the keyboard dismissal button) to activate a floating keyboard mode. The floating keyboard is, quite literally, an iPhone keyboard floating around the iPad’s display. It’s sort of like Picture in Picture, but for the system keyboard.

The new floating keyboard of iPadOS supports slide typing.

Let’s say you’re watching a political debate but also want to keep Twitter on the other side of the screen, but you also need to make sure you can share those hot takes of yours by issuing tweets in rapid succession. You probably wouldn’t want a full-size keyboard to cover those precious tweets and comments, right?28 With the floating keyboard, you can now maximize space for tweets and Safari while retaining the ability to fire off thoughts into Twitter’s political void for the world to consume.

This is what Twitter was made for, right?

On a more serious note, I’m guessing the floating keyboard was primarily designed for smaller iPads that can be held in portrait mode with one hand: the floating keyboard, unlike the full-size one, supports slide typing (a new iPhone feature in iOS 13), so you can hold the device and use your thumb to swipe-type. I don’t own one, nor was I able to test iPadOS 13 on it, but I’m guessing this should be quite comfortable on an iPad mini.

The floating keyboard can be placed anywhere onscreen (you can drag it or fling it around, like the Picture in Picture panel), but I think most people who are interested in it use a smaller iPad and will keep it near one of the display’s bottom corners.

Interestingly, the floating keyboard is not limited to the Apple software keyboard: it also works with third-party keyboards and uses their iPhone layouts if they’re part of a universal bundle. For example, here are Yoink and Gboard (both Universal apps) running as floating keyboards on my iPad Pro:

To use a custom keyboard in floating mode, you’ll have to make Apple’s keyboard floating first, then switch.

Using Yoink’s keyboard in floating mode.

Again, I’m not sure why I’d want to enable this functionality on a daily basis if not for one-handed typing on a small iPad, but I still find it weirdly fascinating that Apple shipped this feature. Personally, I would have preferred to see a comeback of the split keyboard.

Mouse Support

I saved the most anticipated feature for last, even though Apple’s implementation may not be what you were expecting from it.

In iPadOS 13, you can connect USB or Bluetooth mice and trackpads to the iPad and use them to control and navigate its interface. This, however, is an Accessibility feature of the AssistiveTouch framework that allows users with motor impairments to use external pointing devices with their iPads. It’s important to stress this at the outset: Apple has not built native integration with mice and trackpads into UIKit at a system level; they have shipped an Accessibility feature that lets you use an external pointing device to control an AssistiveTouch-powered pointer. As I’ll explain below, this was Apple’s shortest path to enable external pointing devices this year, but it’s not as optimized or integrated as “real” mouse support could be in the future.

To start controlling your iPad with a mouse or trackpad, head over to Settings ⇾ Accessibility ⇾ Touch ⇾ AssistiveTouch ⇾ Devices, and make sure your external pointing device is showing up in the list. If you’re using a Bluetooth accessory, you’ll need to connect from Settings ⇾ Bluetooth first; otherwise, you can use the iPad Pro’s USB-C port, or a Lightning to USB adapter on older iPads, to plug in a wired mouse or trackpad and pair it with AssistiveTouch.

A connected mouse.

The AssistiveTouch pointer is not a new feature of iPadOS or iOS 13: it’s long been available as an Accessibility option to let users control the iOS interface with specialized hardware such as joysticks or control mechanisms installed on wheelchairs (which often cost hundreds of dollars). What’s new this year is that Apple is allowing users to turn any off-the-shelf USB or Bluetooth mouse into a pointing device. Even though Apple rightfully thinks of this feature as an Accessibility option for a specific niche of users, adding support for USB and Bluetooth has opened it up to all kinds of iPad users who have long been wishing for a way to turn their iPads into desktop workstations with an external pointing device, myself included. But because this feature still remains an Accessibility functionality, it’s important to remember that it won’t work like mice or trackpads do on desktop computers.

The first and most important difference between iPadOS and macOS is that UIKit is still designed and optimized for touch input. When you enable mouse support in iPadOS, you’ll notice that the system won’t react to the hover state of the pointer: if you hover over a button in a toolbar, you won’t see a tooltip; if you wait with the cursor over the edge of a document, you won’t see a scroll bar; in Safari, hovering over drop down menus of a webpage will not automatically expand and collapse them. This happens for two reasons: UIKit, the framework behind the iPad’s interface, has no idea of what “hover state” means; UIKit only understands touch input and if you “hover” with your fingers over the screen, well, you’re not touching it. The pointer controlled by a mouse or trackpad isn’t seen by iPadOS as a different control device: for the OS, it’s a virtual replica of your finger that “touches” interface elements even though you’re actually controlling it through external hardware.

So: if UIKit does not adapt to external pointing devices, hover state isn’t understood by iPadOS, and the pointer is considered a virtual finger, does mouse support even help the case of those who want the iPad to behave like a hybrid computer? Surprisingly, despite all these limitations and the feature’s Accessibility nature, the answer is yes.

To put it bluntly, controlling iPadOS 13 with a mouse is weird. If you’re used to working on a desktop computer, mouse support in iPadOS 13 is the uncanny valley of external pointing devices. You’ll find yourself performing interactions and looking at interfaces that were designed for direct manipulation but activating them from an external device – and it kind of feels like the real thing, but something’s off. Swiping on messages in Mail to reveal actions is strange to do with a mouse; instinctively, you’re going to perform a right-click to bring up a contextual menu, but iPadOS has no idea what a right-click is, so you’ll just settle for replicating a swipe gesture with the pointer instead. The more you expect an iPad with a mouse to behave like a Mac with a trackpad, the more your expectations will be subverted and you’ll be reminded that, yes, this feature is an Accessibility option for many, and a stopgap solution for some of us at the moment.

Take opening Control Center as another example: it’s very natural to touch the screen in the upper right corner and swipe down to reveal it. With a mouse, you first have to assign one of its buttons to the ‘Single Tap’ action, then head over to the upper right corner of the display, click and hold the button (so iPadOS thinks you’re “tapping” the screen), then move the mouse down. From text selection (try grabbing the selection handles!) to drag and drop, there are dozens of instances where mouse support in iPadOS 13 manifests itself for what it is: an Accessibility feature that some power users are going to repurpose for something beyond its intended use case.

Mouse support in iPadOS 13 is the uncanny valley of external pointing devices.

Still, despite all of this, the ability to connect a mouse to my iPad Pro has allowed me to use it in a multiplicity of configurations without having to touch the screen. Earlier this year, I bought a Logitech MX Master 2S mouse and applied a series of adjustments to the AssistiveTouch settings to optimize the experience for someone who doesn’t have motor impairments but just wants to control iPadOS with a mouse. First, I made the pointer smaller, changed its color, and set auto-hide to 10 seconds:

Then, I disabled the ‘Always Show Menu’ option so that the main AssistiveTouch menu would stay hidden by default and adjusted the pointer’s tracking speed to a level I was comfortable with:

Lastly, because the MX Master 2S has a total of five configurable buttons, I assigned each of them to a different system action under Devices ⇾ MX Master 2S:

Button 1: Single-Tap

Button 2: Home (I can double-click it to open the app switcher)

Button 3: Long press

Button 4: Open Control Center

Button 5: Toggle the dock

There’s a long list of built-in system actions to choose from when configuring custom mouse buttons.

You can also assign any of your custom shortcuts to mouse buttons. When triggered this way, you’ll have to confirm execution of a shortcut from a notification.

Thanks to programmable buttons, I was able to configure the MX Master 2S so that accessing certain system features is easier when using a mouse. Now when I’m working at my UltraFine 4K display, or if I have the iPad Pro propped up with a vertical stand, I no longer have to lift my hands off the keyboard to touch the screen, which makes the whole experience faster and more suited for a workstation setup. I’ve enjoyed the ability to scroll long documents with the scroll wheel, and I’ve even gotten used to selecting long chunks of text with the pointer. I wouldn’t say that I’m as fast or as proficient at using an iPad Pro with a mouse as I am with multitouch, but I’m getting better and, most importantly, my hands stay on my desk at all times now.

My setup with the iPad Pro and Logitech MX Master 2S.

The black dot shown on the iPad’s screen is the AssistiveTouch cursor set at its smallest size.

Apple may keep saying that support for USB and Bluetooth external pointing devices was primarily designed with Accessibility users in mind, and I believe them, but the die is cast: now that all users have seen that it can be possible to control the iPad’s interface with a mouse or trackpad, they’ll want to do it. It’s too late to pretend those requests and potential use cases don’t exist; we have to wonder when Apple will build proper support for pointing devices at a system level in UIKit.

Sooner or later, Apple will have to face another reality: that in addition to needing a file manager and multiple windows, advanced iPad users have also been plugging their tablets into external displays or placing them in stands or conjured setups the company couldn’t even imagine. And they would like to control iPadOS’ interface with a pointer. What Apple has shipped in iPadOS 13 is a great addition to AssistiveTouch, but it is a stopgap solution that falls short in several other ways. If Apple wants to continue down the path of the iPad as a hybrid computer that can transform into different types of machines, mouse support will have to go beyond an Accessibility setting.

Beyond the Tablet

Relaunching iOS for iPad as iPadOS must have been a careful balancing act for Apple. Redesign the OS too much, and you face the risk of alienating existing users; keep the status quo, and the rebrand may feel unmotivated, if not unnecessary. Apple largely succeeded in their effort: iPadOS 13 continues the trajectory of iOS 9 and iOS 11, but it does so with the newfound confidence of knowing that users demand the iPad go beyond the standard assumptions of a tablet.

You can still use an iPad like a “regular iPad” in iPadOS 13. You don’t have to learn the intricacies of multiwindow or connect a mouse to keep enjoying your classic iPad experience. Despite some missteps, Apple’s done a good job at introducing new complexity that only power users will stumble upon, relying on progressive disclosure to ease users into uncharted territories of the iPad experience such as managing multiple windows.

More than ever before, if you know how to operate the new tools at your disposal, using an iPad can now feel like a crossover between a tablet and a laptop – a computer with many of the same capabilities of a traditional laptop, but reimagined and redesigned for touch.

That’s exactly what I’ve been doing in the past three months since I installed the first beta of iPadOS in June. This review itself was entirely researched, written, and edited on an iPad Pro with iPadOS 13 and a combination of apps that offered multiwindowing capabilities. I usually kept at least three Notes windows open: in the research stage, one of them was paired with MindNode so I could transfer my notes to a map; another was combined with Google Docs in Safari to create my “podcast show notes” workspace; a third one was left open for general purpose note-taking. When I started writing the review in July using Drafts, I took advantage of the app’s multiwindow support to have one window for the latest chapter I was working on, and another open so I could read or manage my other chapters.

Working with multiple apps in Slide Over was essential to finishing the project on time: with Scriptable and Shortcuts always running in Slide Over, I was able to create advanced shortcuts that let those apps communicate with each other and perform tasks (such as uploading screenshots) within the context of Slide Over, without ever interrupting my Split View writing space. The ability to create Reminders windows dedicated to the ‘iOS Review’ project added a lot of flexibility to my workflow, but it also made me wish for the ability to create favorite and permanent workspaces, as I mentioned above.

My typical editing setup for the review.

iPadOS’ new features also came in handy for all the other tasks I perform on my iPad Pro outside of this review. The ability to use a column view and open multiple windows in Files has completely reshaped how I organize my receipts and tax-related documents on iPad; I often just gave up and used the Finder on my Mac to process dozens of documents for my accountant, but now I don’t have to. With widgets on the Home screen, I’ve started tracking my time more judiciously than before because the Timery widget is always there, but I’ve also used my custom widget shortcuts more since the friction involved with opening a separate Today page is gone.

As someone who likes to switch between different setups and work contexts, features such as multiwindow or the ability to access USB drives from Files confirm that the iPad Pro with iPadOS 13 can be an exceptional laptop replacement without the workarounds required in years past. And while Apple hasn’t brought any improvements to external display integration this year (I hope it’s on tap for iPadOS 14), mouse support and new keyboard shortcuts in Apple’s apps have made working with an iPad at a desk more efficient and pleasant. I look at my setup, which involves a 4K USB-C display, a Magic Keyboard, and an MX Master 2S mouse, and I think it’s incredible how, with a single USB-C cable, all of these accessories can now be used either with a Mac mini or a 2018 iPad Pro.

The iPad Pro with iPadOS 13 can be an exceptional laptop replacement.

It takes a while to get used to iPadOS 13, particularly its multiwindow capabilities; after three months, I think I’m still adapting to them as well. Ultimately, adoption of multiwindow – along with desktop-class Safari, the marquee feature of iPadOS 13 – comes down to third-party developers, and I’m keen to see how quickly my favorite iPad apps will add support for opening multiple windows. For iPadOS 13 to succeed in professional environments, which is arguably what Apple wants from this update, developers will have to take Apple’s vision and run with it.

At this point, I don’t know if rebranding iOS as iPadOS means Apple will devote attention to the platform on a regular basis. Only time will gift us with that absolute certainty. But I know this: years from now, if Apple’s plan is successful, we’ll likely look back at iPadOS’ debut as an inevitable building block for the iPad’s future. Because in iPadOS lies more than a shiny new name: it’s a redefinition of intent and an altogether new vision for the platform.

There’s never been a better time for iPad users to come along for the ride.

Apps

Although not as substantial as Files, Photos, Reminders, or Safari, iOS 13 features an array of updates to other built-in apps, bringing quality-of-life improvements that positively affect the daily experience.

Mail

I was expecting to lead this section arguing how, for yet another year, Apple’s built-in email app was left languishing without any updates. While Mail hasn’t received the same amount of attention Apple paid to Safari or Reminders this year, and even though I still believe Mail is in dire need of that kind of rethinking, I can’t complain too much: this year, Mail does come with some noteworthy enhancements on both iOS and iPadOS.

First up is the message composer, which now hosts a large title for an email’s subject field and a conspicuous upward-pointing arrow in lieu of iOS 12’s plain ‘Send’ button. “Hey kids, email is fun!”, Apple seems to be saying with this bolder compose window, and I like it.

The new composer interface in Mail.

The big news around the new composer involves the functionalities Apple removed from their secluded location in the copy and paste menu and surfaced as part of a new toolbar that handles both formatting controls and attachments. In the process, not only did Apple swap locations for existing features, but they also revamped how you can format your messages and added new options for sending attachments over email.

The new toolbar, available by tapping the chevron on the right side of the QuickType bar (on iPhone; it’s always shown on iPad), offers buttons to show formatting controls, attach images or files, scan documents, and create sketched annotations. While Mail provided some basic formatting options in the past, they were few, tucked away in the copy and paste menu, and a far cry from the bevy of options available on macOS; for the first time since its inception over a decade ago, Mail now comes with a proper formatting palette.

The new toolbar and formatting controls in iOS 13.

Besides the existing basic formatting options, you can choose fonts with a native system picker (also new in iOS 13), change colors, create lists, increase and decrease quote levels, and modify text alignment. I’m not the type of user who likes to format their email messages like Word documents, but I’ve always found it ridiculous that Mail – a ten year-old product – couldn’t let me tweak fonts in a response to a long email. Although they’re not as extensive as on the desktop (where’s the option to create hyperlinks?), it’s great to have a built-in formatting tool in Mail, which used to be one of the most common criticisms of the app. I also like how the panel is presented on iPhone at the bottom of the screen.29

Formatting controls on iPad.

The photo picker has also been integrated with the new toolbar and redesigned to be presented as a panel; unlike formatting controls, it can be expanded to reveal more items in your recent photos, which is the default view of the picker.30 In a welcome touch, you can attach multiple images to a message by just tapping on them – no need to go back and forth between the picker and the message composer as was the case in iOS 12.31 If you often send photos to colleagues over email, the efficiency granted by this improvement alone might be good enough a reason to upgrade to iOS 13.

Sizzling hot takes.

The other icons in the formatting toolbar provide a more obvious location for features that were previously hidden in the copy and paste menu (which still has them, but it’s much easier to access them via the toolbar). You can take a new picture and insert it in the message; pick a document with a native Files picker; new in iOS 13, you can scan a document to PDF using the system’s document scanner; and you can enter markup mode to start drawing something and send it over email as an attachment. If you ever feel compelled to start drawing your next masterpiece in Apple Mail, you know where to find the feature now.

That’s not all that Apple has done to the composer in Mail, however. In iPadOS, the composer is treated as its own scene, meaning it can be dragged away to become its own window. Owing to the fact that multiple scenes can coexist for the same app in iPadOS, you can thus pair different Mail composer windows with different apps in Split View and Slide Over – useful if you’re writing email messages for different work-related projects on your iPad.

Multiple composer windows in iPadOS.

Based on the same principle, every message can become its own standalone Mail window in iPadOS: pick up a message, drag it to the side of the screen, and let go to generate an auxiliary Mail window for that specific message. When you’re done working with it, tapping the ‘Done’ button in the upper right corner will dismiss the message and close the window.

My email needs are too basic for this to be a common occurrence, but, thanks to this system, it’s possible to create separate workspaces for specific message threads, composer windows, or other app windows. If, for instance, you’ve received a new issue of MacStories Weekly and want to check out the links we’ve posted in a standalone Safari instance dedicated to the newsletter’s links, that kind of workflow is now supported via Mail and Safari’s multiwindow capabilities in iPadOS.

A workspace dedicated to opening links from our newsletter, MacStories Weekly.

Beyond the refreshed composer interface and multiple windows, there are other improvements Apple brought to Mail this year to bolster its (somewhat dwindling) desktop-class reputation. The message viewer has been redesigned32 so it now features two actions: the archive/delete button (depending on your preferences) and reply. The reply button, however, spawns a new panel that’s like a custom share sheet for Mail: along the top edge, you’ll see large buttons laid out horizontally to reply, reply all, forward, and archive; underneath those commonly used actions, you’ll find a vertical list of options including flag (which can now have multiple colors in iOS 13), move, mute, and thread notifications.

Mail, like other Apple apps, has adopted SF Symbols in iOS 13.

The new action sheet in iOS 13.

I like to spend as little time in Mail as possible, and most of my “triaging” these days happens from swipe gestures in the inbox (where the ‘Archive’ action has a new purple color), so I don’t use the extended reply menu often. I think it’s a good idea to group related options together in a dedicated panel; I wonder, though, if less adventurous users will have trouble finding actions that used to be visible in the viewer’s toolbar, and which are now hidden behind a button that ostensibly looks like a reply function, not a multi-purpose menu. Mail still doesn’t offer third-party app integrations like clients such as Spark or Airmail, but if Apple ever opens Mail up to third-party extensions, they should probably live in this contextual menu.

Moving on to the smaller, but still welcome, enhancements to Mail this year, you now have the option to mute specific threads. By muting a thread, you’ll stop receiving notifications for new messages belonging to it, and you’ll also be able to configure an action to be performed automatically for each new message in a muted thread. Under Settings ⇾ Mail ⇾ Threading ⇾ Muted Thread Action, you’ll find the option to archive/delete or skip the inbox. This is not as powerful as creating your own rules for automatic message processing in macOS’ Mail, but it’s also more intuitive for newcomers and, arguably, just as effective if all you care about is silencing your cousin Dave, who keeps replying with unrelated emoji to the ‘Family Vacation 2019’ email thread. Seriously, Dave: it’s time to stop.

If mute isn’t enough, Mail also integrates with your block list in iOS and iPadOS: the same email addresses you’ve blocked for calls and texts can be blocked in Mail too, and you can decide how to dispense of their messages. You can automatically move them to the trash, mark them as blocked and leave them in the inbox, or do nothing. It would have been interesting to have an option to bounce the message back to the sender, but these options will suffice for now.

Lastly in terms of new settings, you can now configure Mail’s behavior for replies to messages that contain attachments, choosing from four options as pictured below.

In case it wasn’t clear from the screenshots above, the entirety of Mail’s interface has been slightly refreshed: Apple’s using SF Symbols everywhere in the app, colors have been updated to play nice with dark mode, and fonts are a bit bigger and thicker in various places. Peek and pop has been replaced by context menus, which contain most of the actions you’d otherwise see in the action menu inside the message viewer.

Mail’s context menus show a preview of the selected message.

My favorite tweak to Mail in iOS 13 is one that Apple hasn’t mentioned anywhere, and which is hidden enough to make you wonder if an Apple engineer was able to sneak it in without their boss knowing. In iOS and iPadOS 13, if you select some text in a message, hit ‘Share’ from the copy and paste menu, then choose the Reminders extension, you’ll create a reminder that carries the message’s subject as title and a deep link to the message that will reopen it in Mail. Even if you archive the message or move it to a different folder, tapping the Mail icon in the reminder will continue working, taking you from Reminders to the original message with one tap.

Creating a reminder with a deep link to a Mail message.

The ability to create message reminders with Mail deep links was previously exclusive to voice interactions with “Hey Siri, remind me about this” on iPhone; on iPad, they could also be created by dragging a message from Mail into the Reminders app. Creating a deep-linked reminder with the share sheet is easier and faster than both methods; as a result, I now save messages to Reminders more frequently, and my Mail inbox is cleaner because I archive messages as soon as they’re saved in Reminders for future processing.

As much as Mail has grown in iOS 13, there’s still plenty of work to be done on two fronts: Mail still isn’t quite as desktop-class as Apple’s desktop client, lacking rules and smart folders; and, Apple still hasn’t implemented features that have become a staple of the modern email experience in third-party apps such as snoozing and app integrations.

However, Apple fixed several of Mail’s longstanding limitations with this year’s revision, and, more importantly, they’ve shown signs of life for an app that has too long remained anchored to its iPhone origins from the last decade. I’m trying Apple Mail again as my default email client: there’s something inherently nice about its elegant design and interface fluidity, and I’ve found its hidden Reminders integration perfectly suited for my email workflow. For the first time in years, I feel kind of optimistic about Mail’s future.

Notes

Having reached a relative degree of maturity following years of major feature upgrades, Notes in iOS 13 sports a variety of quality-of-life improvements that extend the app, bring feature parity with macOS, but don’t subvert the experience Apple’s been fine-tuning for the past few years.

There are two significant additions to folder management in Notes this year: it is now possible to create and manage sub-folders on iOS, and you can share and collaborate on entire folders with other people.

Sub-folders in Notes.

Sub-folder management and creation had long been available in the Mac version of the Notes app, and it was one of the features I kept mentioning as an example of the iPad’s ongoing limitations compared to desktop computers. The limitation is no more: folders can now be put inside other folders via drag and drop, or you can hit the ‘Edit’ button at the top of the Folders list, tap the ellipsis button next to a folder, and select ‘Move This Folder’. You can go as deep into a nested folder structure as you want (you can put sub-folders inside sub-folders inside sub-folders); you can expand and collapse folders by tapping a disclose button next to their name.

Managing sub-folders in Notes for iOS 13.

As someone who keeps ~450 notes in the Notes app, being able to organize them all directly on my iPad or iPhone without turning on my Mac mini is yet another way Apple has freed me from the desktop this year. I just wish Notes would remember the state of expanded/collapsed folders across app relaunches.

Also in the folder department, Apple is following up one of iOS 10’s best features, note sharing, with the ability to share entire Notes folders with other people. The feature works exactly as you’d expect: in addition to sharing an individual note with others, you can now share a folder too.

To share a folder, swipe on it and tap the blue sharing icon.

When a folder is shared, all the notes contained inside it are automatically shared too. In my limited tests this summer (I was only able to collaborate on shared folders with two people), the feature behaved like an extension of traditional note sharing, and I couldn’t have asked for more. In the three years since Apple launched CloudKit-based sharing for notes, I’ve come to depend on this functionality to collaborate with colleagues on work documents; for instance, we use Notes’ sharing to prepare the show notes for our iPad podcast Adapt. I’ve rarely had issues with sharing in Notes, and for this reason I’m happy Apple is extending the functionality to folders. Once I’m back to my regular writing routine, I know I’m going to rethink my folder organization in Notes around sub-folders and shared folders.

After tackling folder management and sharing, Apple focused on evolving Notes by building upon its existing feature set and rich text environment. One of Notes’ peculiar traits is its flexible support for attachments within notes, so Apple added a new gallery view that turns a folder into a grid of thumbnails. Gallery view33 displays all your notes as thumbnails, each using either the first attachment (image, PDF, drawing, etc.) or first lines of text in a note as its preview.

You can customize the size of thumbnails in the iPad’s gallery view. On iPhone, the size cannot be customized.

You can enable gallery view by pressing the grid button underneath the search bar at the top of a folder.

Gallery view is reminiscent of grid views in Photos and Files; it’s the ideal tool to browse collections of notes heavy on attachments, such as those that contain photos or drawings, but text inside thumbnails is surprisingly readable too.

Gallery view works well for notes that contain attachments (center) and supports the new context menus in iOS 13 (right).

I don’t use gallery view much myself because most of my notes are text-based, and I generally prefer seeing longer note titles rather than thumbnail previews. I understand, however, why Apple added this view option: it works especially well for annotations and drawings, which is Notes’ forte for iPad/Pencil users. In a disappointing limitation of the app, while it is possible to set sorting options per-folder, gallery view is an app-wide setting – you can’t enable it for specific folders only. I hope this changes in a future update.

Those who spend way too much time carefully crafting consistent outlines of sections in their notes (this is not self-referential at all) may be happy to know that a new ‘Subheading’ formatting option has been added in iOS 13.

I’m one of the handful of users who’s incredibly happy that a subheading option was added to Notes.

Subheadings are designed to mark up sub-sections contained inside a bigger heading; they’re essentially Body-sized elements with a bold font applied, and they serve their purpose well. I wish I could tell you that I didn’t spend hours reorganizing my longer notes with headings and subheadings to make them prettier and better organized, but then again I did it “for science”.

Subheadings can also be added by pressing ⌘⌥J from an external keyboard.

Speaking of changes to sections inside notes: if you’re a checklist user, you can now reorder checklist items with drag and drop, and there’s a new option in Settings ⇾ Notes ⇾ Sort Checked Items to automatically move checked items to the bottom of a checklist. Additionally, for both checklists and regular lists, you can now indent and outdent lines by swiping across them with your finger, which is a delightful addition to Notes’ text editing environment. Unfortunately, just like in Mail, there’s still no way to create rich text hyperlinks in Notes besides pasting one previously copied from another app.

Lastly, Notes in iOS 13 features two powerful additions to search. Thanks to improvements to the Vision framework this year, Notes can now recognize text inside images and allow you to search for it. In my tests, results were astounding: the image analysis powered by the Vision API (which is private, runs on-device, and is open to developers with separate “fast” and “accurate” recognition modes) took less than a couple seconds to run (entirely in the background) and find text in images I dropped in the app as new notes.

Different modes for text recognition inside images in iOS 13.

There’s nothing you need to do for image OCR to be applied, no setting to enable: just search for text you think was in an image, and Notes will display the note containing the matching attachment in search results.

Searching for text contained in an image with Notes.

The feature’s not perfect yet as Notes doesn’t highlight the found text inside an image, but Apple’s off to a great start thanks to the high performance and inherent privacy granted by the Vision framework, which is proving to be one of Apple’s smartest investments in terms of developer technologies in recent years.34 I feel a lot more comfortable taking screenshots of articles and webpages knowing that they’ll be searchable in Notes.

As for search itself, tapping into the search bar reveals new suggestions to filter notes by type, which include:

Shared Notes

Locked Notes

Notes with Checklists

Notes with Drawings

Notes with Scanned Images

Notes with Attachments

Surprisingly, Apple hasn’t added support for tokenized searches with custom criteria (as seen in Files) to Notes yet. I hope that’s in the cards for future updates later in the iOS 13 cycle.

Messages

Messages’ iOS 13 update largely focuses on expanding Memoji adoption across the system, with a handful of other enhancements to Animoji and message search.

Let’s start from the other additions. There are three new Animoji characters in iOS 13: mouse, octopus, and cow. The mouse and cow are fine; I don’t know why – I think it’s the detail of the skin that gets me, or perhaps it’s the moving tentacles – but I find the octopus deeply disturbing. Its hollow eyes haunt me every time I open the Animoji app in Messages, and I wish there was a way to wipe it from existence. It’s creepy, it’s got tentacles, and this monstrosity belongs in the ocean, not iMessage. I’m willing to bet the octopus Animoji played a heavy role in Jony Ive’s departure from Apple.

Get that…thing out of my face.

On a more positive note, much to the disappointment of Casey Liss, the Messages app now comes with an option to automatically share your name and profile picture with other iMessage users. The ‘Share Name and Photo’ feature is available in Settings ⇾ Messages (it’s also brought up by Messages the first time you open it in iOS 13) and it’s presented as a way to share the name and profile picture of your iCloud account when sending messages. You can set a name and choose a photo from iOS’ intelligent suggestions, which include a selection of your own photos over the years, your initials in different colors, and Animoji/Memoji, which will let you “strike your favorite pose” before assigning a picture.

iOS 13 scans your photo library and gives you suggestions for photos to use as profile pictures.

The picture you set via this tool will update your online iCloud profile in addition to your iMessage one. You can also choose to share your name and photo with contacts automatically or to be asked every time you’re texting someone. In the Messages app, when somebody has a new name and profile picture available, you’ll see a helpful banner to update their contact information, which will be saved to the Contacts app.

When one of your contacts has updated their name and profile picture, you’ll be able to choose which one to update on your end.

I’m still using Vignette to routinely update profile pictures for contacts who don’t use iMessage (Liss’ app also supports a variety of data sources, and iOS 13 does not), but I’ve enjoyed the ability to update iMessage contacts with one tap. I think it’s going to be fun to switch things up every once in a while with a new Memoji or Animoji character.

When you’re composing a message to someone, you can double-tap their name in the ‘To’ field at the top and reveal more contact options such as alternate phone numbers or email addresses.

Search used to be one of the worst features of the Messages app; it’s been entirely rebuilt in iOS 13, and it’s now an incredible tool to find old conversations and content shared inside them.

There are a couple aspects to message search worth noting. Detail views inside threads now collect all photos, links, locations, Wallet passes, and attachments ever shared in a conversation, allowing you to go back in time and check out an old article or tweet you shared with your friends. There’s virtually no lag when scrolling through links that go back several years in a conversation, which is an astounding performance achievement. I was able to find links and photos going back to over three years ago in the Messages app for iOS 13, which I didn’t think was ever going to be possible. In a nice touch, it’s even an option to pick between photos and screenshots when looking for old images, and you can press on links to reveal a preview and associated context menu.

The amazing new search feature of Messages in iOS 13.

There’s more: because all this content has been indexed by iOS, it can be searched as well. And when you search, not only does Messages surface individual messages and attachments that match your query, but you can choose to preview an attachment with a long press or tap it to jump back to the moment in time when it was originally shared in a thread. Remember a Breath of the Wild screenshot that someone sent you back in spring 2017? You can now search for it, find it, preview it, and load the transcript for the original conversation in just a few seconds. Imagine this, but applied to photos, PDF documents, tweets, or articles from Safari shared in a thread, plus individual messages, and you get the idea.

“Machop, Shellder, Porygon, Hitmonchan”, as the Pokérap goes.

This link was originally shared with my friends in 2017. I never liked Tingle either.

From both a design and performance standpoint, Messages’ new search feature is amazing, and it’s helped me find documents and links I thought had been forever lost to Messages in iCloud. I now feel more comfortable knowing that everything I share on Messages can be easily found and re-exported later. I wish that search in Mail were as powerful as it is now in Messages.

The vast majority of users upgrading to iOS 13 today will likely be interested in the new features available for Memoji, of which there are plenty. You can now customize eyeliner and eyeshadow with editing tools to get the look just right. There are new options for teeth such as braces and a gold grill; you can add piercings to your nose, mouth, tongue, and eyebrows; there are 30 new hairstyles, over 15 new pieces of headwear, additional earrings and glasses, and, yes, even AirPods. One of my Memoji criticisms last year was that Apple didn’t offer nearly enough personalization features, and I’m glad they’ve listened.

New options for Memoji creation in iOS 13, featuring Silvia.

You can create and manage your Memoji from the Animoji app in Messages (the one with the monkey icon), but there’s also a new Memoji Stickers app in iOS 13 to send pre-made stickers featuring a variety of poses, contexts, and expressions using your Memoji or Animoji as characters. The feature was clearly inspired by the success of Bitmoji; even though Apple’s selection of scenes is ridiculously limited compared to Snap’s creation tool, the stickers included in iOS 13 are fun and cover the basics well. Obviously, many more will be needed in the future for Apple to compete at the same level as Bitmoji.

Memoji and Animoji sticker packs are only supported on devices with an A9 chip or later, and they do not require a TrueDepth camera.

The poses included in Memoji stickers for iOS 13.

Memoji stickers can be attached like any other sticker pack to conversations in the Messages app, but Apple has also integrated them with the emoji keyboard in iOS 13, even though they’re not technically emoji (Memoji aren’t part of Unicode). In the emoji keyboard35, you’ll now see a selection of frequently used Memoji stickers on the left side of “real” emoji.36

Memoji stickers in Messages.

Because Memoji stickers are not fonts – they’re images – iOS is proactive enough to hide them altogether when the keyboard is focused on a text field that doesn’t support image input, such as Search or the Safari address bar. In other apps such as Twitter, Notes, Instagram, or WhatsApp, Memoji stickers will be inserted as image attachments (PNGs).

A selection of Memoji stickers are available on the left side of the standard emoji keyboard.

Memoji stickers are shared as PNGs in apps that support image attachments.

On a philosophical level, I dislike the intrusion of Memoji stickers in the emoji keyboard: Memoji are Apple’s take on custom characters and they do not belong to the standardized, cross-platform world of emoji. On the other hand, I understand Apple’s desire to expand Memoji and make them useful across other apps besides Messages, leveraging them as yet another selling point of the iOS ecosystem. The emoji keyboard was the most obvious candidate for this kind of advertising push; considering how most people buy into the idea of “celebrity emoji” that aren’t really emoiji at all, I think Apple will be fine, and the integration will instantly make sense for folks who, unlike us, do not bother with the technicalities of Unicode code points. I just wonder if Jeremy Burge will ever be able to forgive Apple for this.

Home

It’s been a busy year for the HomeKit and AirPlay teams at Apple: earlier this year, the company launched a new initiative to integrate their HomeKit and AirPlay 2 frameworks into third-party television sets from the likes of Samsung, LG, and Vizio. The move is likely geared at gaining a foothold in the video streaming ecosystem ahead of the launch of Apple TV+ in November; independently from Apple’s secondary motivation, the net result is that more users can now manage their TVs (as well as AirPlay 2 speakers, which are also growing in number) inside the Home app for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.

In addition to the automation changes I covered in the Shortcuts chapter, there are other new features coming to the Home app in iOS 13 that can’t be evaluated at this stage, for they necessitate software updates that haven’t been released yet.

Later this year, users will be able to configure HomePods and AirPlay 2 speakers to participate in scenes and automations. I wasn’t able to test this functionality as it requires a new version of audioOS, and Apple doesn’t run a beta program for the HomePod’s software. I’m excited about the idea of using my HomePod as a speaker for my HomeKit security system as well as other Shortcuts-based automations, but I’ll have to report back on this later.

Also later this year (after iOS 13.1), Apple is launching HomeKit Secure Video, an iCloud hosting plan for videos recorded by HomeKit cameras, which are encrypted and sent to Apple for online storage. Presented at WWDC, HomeKit Secure Video was pitched as a secure alternative to proprietary cloud storage services implemented by manufacturers of cameras that often store your private videos in a cloud somewhere (with dubious security practices) in order to perform cloud-based image analysis. In an unsurprising move given its privacy stance, Apple’s taking advantage of its integrated ecosystem with a different approach: when a camera detects something in your home, videos will be analyzed by HomeKit hubs (Apple TVs, HomePods, and iPads) locally, encrypted, and sent to Apple for storage in iCloud.

You can control nearby accessories from a camera’s notification in iOS 13.

With HomeKit Secure Video, you’ll be able to configure local video analysis so that a camera records only when motion is detected and people, animals, or vehicles are present. You’ll get up to 10 days of recording history in iCloud to review your footage, but you’ll be required to have a 200 GB iCloud plan for one HomeKit Secure Video-enabled camera, or a 2 TB plan for up to five cameras. According to Apple, both Logitech and Netatmo are already on board with HomeKit Secure Video and will release software updates to enable it on their cameras in the near future.

I own three Logi Circle 2 cameras, which are set to become compatible with HomeKit Secure Video, but I can’t comment on the feature yet as I wasn’t able to test it. I will say, however, that having signed up over the years for various camera subscription services to unlock motion detection with push notifications, and having felt somewhat uncomfortable about them, I welcome Apple’s entrance in this space. I’ll feel better knowing that videos recorded in the intimacy of my home will be end-to-end encrypted locally and stored on a service I trust and already pay for. I’m curious to see if Apple’s person and animal recognition will be smarter than third-party versions, and I look forward to integrating these deeper controls with my existing HomeKit automations. On paper, HomeKit Secure Video sounds like a terrific addition to the Home app for owners of HomeKit cameras.

Unfortunately, for all the promising features on the horizon, I believe the Home app shipping today in iOS 13 is a regression of the user experience due to a single feature implemented by Apple in this release: service grouping.

In iOS 13, accessories that contain multiple sensors or data points (what Apple calls services) are automatically grouped as a single item in the Home app. If a temperature sensor exposes both temperature and humidity, those services will no longer be two separate tiles in the Home app; similarly, outlets that feature multiple plugs will be grouped under a single object in the Home app.

Logically speaking, the decision feels reasonable enough: if different services belong to the same “master” accessory, they should be grouped together, and the user must navigate to them by opening a separate page as if they were navigating into a sub-folder of related files. The problem is that the actual experience of using the Home app in iOS 13 defeats Apple’s logic and poor design choices.

In iOS 12, services were presented as individual “accessories”, each with its own tile. It may not have been conceptually accurate to represent services as accessories – but that’s a different discussion regarding the overall design of the Home app. For better or worse, users could see multiple data points at a glance just by navigating into a room. By comparison, service grouping in iOS 13 only shows you how many services are available within a single tile, removing useful information from the main screen. The structure is more logical and technically accurate, but, practically speaking, it’s an inferior design that adds an extra step to the experience.

Let’s take a look at a few examples. Here’s what the ‘Kitchen’ room of my Home configuration looks like in iOS 12 and iOS 13:

Service grouping in iOS 13.

As you can see, I used to be able to open the room, glance at the top row of tiles, and see the current humidity and temperature levels; in iOS 13, there is a single ‘Eve Degree’ tile that just says “2 sensors” with no actionable information. To see those data points now, I have to press on the tile to reveal a dedicated card, which makes a particularly poor use of screen real estate on iPad:

It only gets worse from here. Thanks to homebridge, I’ve been able to add HomeKit capabilities to my Samsung and LG televisions, which do not officially integrate with Apple’s framework. In iOS 12, I could see the multiple services belonging to each TV as individual accessories that supported one-tap actions; in iOS 13, all those services have been merged under one tile:

More elegant design, but not any faster.

To interact with the services (in this case, switches) available for a single accessory in iOS 13, you have to open a page that contains a list of giant switches to scroll through. I wish I was kidding, but you can take a look at the screenshot below. My favorite part is the very helpful summary at the top of the page, featuring 23 instances of ‘Powered Off’ for my TV in iOS 13.

Powered Off. Powered Off. Powered Off.

This design affects all kinds of accessories that contain multiple services – it’s not a homebridge-related issue. Case in point: some officially licensed HomeKit accessories often embed vastly different services within the same physical product. For example, you may find a ceiling fan that also has a light built-in or, in my case, a HomeKit security system with a built-in light. In iOS 12, that product – an Aqara hub – was clearly indicated with two separate tiles in the Home app, each presenting different information and controls; due to service grouping in iOS 13, a security system with a light has become one tile. Therefore, when I open the Home app now, I see that my alarm has…69% brightness and is displayed as a lightbulb.

Nice.

Of course, to interact with the light and security system, you have to open a separate page that puts the two accessories next to each other:

You get the idea. As I mentioned above, I find Apple’s implementation of service grouping to be a regression from the Home app’s design in iOS 12. It feels like grouping was designed by engineers to reconcile HomeKit’s technical spec with the Home app, and that design falls short of understanding how people think of interactions with smart accessories.

There are ways Apple could mitigate this: service grouping could become optional, for instance, and tiles in the Home app should expose key data points for accessories such as temperature sensors. I’m still using Apple’s Home app to create and manage my automations, but until service grouping gets fixed, I’m moving my main interactions to Shortcuts and Matthias Hochgatterer’s Home app.

An example of service grouping done right: the third-party Home app features larger titles that let you preview key data points at a glance.

If anything, Apple’s disappointing implementation of service grouping in iOS 13 confirms one thing: it’s time for a radical rethinking of the Home app. A collection of squares isn’t cutting it anymore.

There are some good changes in the Home app, but they can’t do much to offset the annoyance caused by Apple’s poor grouping implementation. As we’ve seen above, detail screens for accessories (shown after long-pressing on them) have been redesigned in iOS 13, and Apple added some useful shortcuts to them. Lights, for instance, show a colored slider along with a grid of six color shortcuts that can be customized for fast access. Changing colors requires one tap less in iOS 13 – there’s no comparison with the old screen in iOS 12:

In iOS 13.1, there are also new accessory icons to choose from, which animate slightly when you interact with them. It’s a nice touch.

Same for HomePods and Apple TVs: while iOS 12 displayed a useless full-screen modal view with the device’s name in the middle, iOS 13 shows a playback widget so you can control what’s playing on a HomePod or Apple TV from within the Home app.

Progress!

When viewing an accessory’s detail screen, you can see which scenes the selected accessory is already participating in. Furthermore, iOS 13 displays suggested scenes in this screen; scenes are also suggested when first adding a new accessory to your Home configuration.

In a move likely inspired by Aaron Pearce’s excellent HomeCam, the camera video screen has been redesigned in iOS 13 with a new switcher menu to navigate between multiple cameras as well as a button to quickly control accessories located in the same room as the camera you’re currently viewing. As I argued when I reviewed HomeCam, which was first to the market with this feature, I find it convenient to check on a room’s temperature level or quickly turn on a nearby light when I’m viewing its camera feed.

You can interact with accessories located in the same room of a camera you’re currently viewing.

I wonder how much time Pearce has until Apple copies his camera grid view at this point.

Music

As the gateway to a service used by over 60 million customers, iOS’ Music app doesn’t abide by Apple’s traditional app development timeline anymore: changes are frequent, deployed at a massive scale, and encompassing different facets of a service which goes beyond the app on our iPhones and iPads.

In the past year alone, Apple has iterated on Apple Music’s personality by commissioning custom artwork for its most popular playlists, collaborated with artists on exclusive perks for album releases, expanded its celebrity outreach with playlist curators and rebranded playlists, and leveraged its Shazam acquisition for discovery of new artists. None of these changes would fit anywhere on a WWDC slide for a new version of iOS, yet their influence on the overall Apple Music experience can be felt on a daily basis. Such is the nature of a service-oriented business which requires constant updates, experimentation, and a departure from monolithic app releases.

From this standpoint, it shouldn’t surprise you that browsing the Music app in iOS 13 feels very different from last year, but that’s mostly because of new sections and playlists that have been added to the service over the last 12 months. That said, there are two major new features in the Music app itself in iOS and iPadOS 13, one of which fulfills a longstanding dream of mine regarding modern music streaming services: time-synced lyrics.

Available today for an undisclosed segment of the songs in Apple Music’s catalog, time-synced lyrics can be accessed from the app’s updated Now Playing screen (more on this in a bit) by tapping the quotes button in the lower left corner. If time-synced lyrics are available, rather than being presented with paragraphs of text for the whole song at once, you’ll see a new UI where each line of text is bigger and follows the music, allowing you to better comprehend lyrics and, most importantly, sing along.

Time-synced lyrics in iOS 13.

If you’re familiar with karaoke, that’s exactly what this feature is, only it’s been integrated with a music streaming service in a way that, to the best of my knowledge, only Musixmatch and Amazon Music (via X-Ray) did before. But while Musixmatch required using a third-party utility to view time-synced lyrics for Apple Music and Amazon Music required, well, listening via the Amazon ecosystem, time-synced lyrics are natively integrated with the Apple Music experience and they’re helping me enjoy my favorite songs even more.

When they’re available, time-synced lyrics scroll on their own within the Now Playing screen, which features a dynamic blurred background that blends key colors from the song’s artwork and lets them slowly float underneath text. The visual effect is pleasant and fun; it’s like a combination of iOS’ motion wallpapers and Apple Card’s dynamic coloring, and it makes the lyrics screen unique for each song.

Different background colors for time-synced lyrics.

You can tap on lyrics to automatically advance to a specific part of a song; if you don’t touch the screen for a few seconds, controls will disappear and time-synced lyrics take over.37 To go back to the rest of the app, you can either swipe the lyrics view down or tap the artwork in the upper left corner, which will return you to the standard Now Playing screen without lyrics shown.

If time-synced lyrics are not available, the Now Playing screen will retain the dynamic background coloring, but you’ll be presented with a regular plain text view for lyrics instead. Unlike iOS 12, song credits in this view are displayed at the very top before lyrics, which is a thoughtful detail.

By the way, this song’s acoustic version is possibly better than the original one.

You can also view plain text lyrics by tapping ‘View Full Lyrics’ in a song’s action sheet.

As someone who cares deeply about the craft of songwriting and the meaning of songs, I consider time-synced lyrics one of my all-time favorite additions to Apple’s Music app. The ability to learn a song’s lyrics by reading and singing along is a spectacular improvement to Apple Music’s offering. This feature is helping me develop a newfound appreciation for music as a delivery tool for personal, emotional messages: it’s one thing to read Death Cab for Cutie’s What Sarah Said as a block of text, and it’s another to sing alongside Ben Gibbard’s “Amongst the vending machines and year-old magazines in a place where we only say goodbye” line. If you care about the art of songwriting, time-synced lyrics in Apple Music might be worth the price of admission to the service alone.

￼Lyrics Accuracy

As others have noted before, Apple Music has long offered slightly incorrect lyrics for songs in its database. In my experience with iOS 13, the same appears to be unfortunately true for time-synced lyrics as well. It’s small errors such as “in place” instead of “in the place” for the song I mentioned above, but they’re noticeable, and they cheapen the overall experience when you run across them. Given that Apple is filling the time-synced lyrics database in-house instead of relying on third-party data providers, I hope the company can figure out a way to fix incorrect lyrics more quickly.

As I hinted above, iOS 13 also brings a refreshed look for the Now Playing screen, which had been mostly left unchanged since its last redesign in iOS 10. The song’s title and artist name are now left-aligned and they sit above the progress bar; this makes the Now Playing screen feel more spacious and has the practical benefit of letting the app fit more text onscreen without truncation. The system-wide encircled ellipsis button has been placed on the right side of a song’s title, leaving room for a new button along the bottom edge of the screen.

The new button in the bottom right corner of Now Playing opens Up Next: Apple has finally decided to provide a solution for the long national nightmare of having to scroll to find out what’s coming up next or simply trigger shuffle and repeat. In iOS 13, the Now Playing screen can no longer be swiped vertically and Up Next is a standalone screen that you can toggle with the press of a button, which is considerably faster than its old activation method in iOS 12. Not only is the new Up Next easier to reach and operate, but it also shows where songs are playing from (an album or a playlist) and you can tap the ‘Playing From’ label to instantly jump to the source item.

Up Next in iOS 13.

The Now Playing screen now comprises two buttons that open separate screens atop traditional player controls – lyrics and Up Next – and I think this is an overall smarter design than iOS 12’s scroll-based approach. In the old Music app, you had to carefully swipe to open lyrics or reach Up Next; now, you can just tap, check on your queue, and dismiss the screen with one tap. Shuffle and repeat can also be engaged from Up Next by activating their icons at the top of the list.

On iPad, the Now Playing screen features the same design and interactions, and it still is displayed as a modal element on the right side of the screen; oddly, however, its window has been redesigned to resemble a detachable, floating panel, even though it can neither be detached from its location nor float atop other apps.

The iPad’s Now Playing window is a perplexing design decision: it’s almost as if Apple thought of making it a standalone window, sort of like the message composer in Mail, but then gave up on the idea halfway through the process, leaving us with an empty shell of the floating Now Playing screen that could have been. Apple should at least allow us to swipe the Now Playing screen to either side of the Music app; alas, the Music app for iPad still doesn’t take advantage of the device’s screen real estate – something that even the beta web app does.

In unifying custom app actions and extensions with the new share sheet, Apple also revised Music’s action sheet: Music-specific actions (Love, Play Next, Add to a Playlist, etc.) no longer have their own menu, separate from the share sheet; instead, everything lives in a share sheet that, however, only shows vertical actions when it’s first invoked. Essentially, Music has fully embraced the share sheet in iOS 13, but only half of it comes up when you first press on a song or album.

The action menu you see when long-pressing a song or album has changed in iOS 13.

To view the complete share sheet with contact suggestions, AirDrop, and share extensions, you still have to tap a separate ‘Share’ action first:

The full share sheet, as in other apps, contains both Music-specific actions and shortcuts.

I don’t know why Apple stuck with hiding share extensions from Music’s share sheet by default (are they afraid people are going to…checks note…share links with their friends?), but I can’t say I disagree with the idea of ridding Music of its custom action sheet. Thanks to the share sheet in iOS 13, I was able to create a custom list of favorite actions that include both my custom Music shortcuts and often-used Music in-app actions; other Music actions remain accessible by scrolling down into the sheet. I miss the custom placement of the Love/Dislike buttons in Music’s old custom sheet, but the new one grants me the flexibility of creating my own menu, which is worth the trade-off.

I want to conclude this section by mentioning one last enhancement to the Music app, an obvious, long-awaited tweak that Apple shipped in iOS 13: Music now warns you when you’re adding a song that’s already in a playlist.

Other Apps

In addition to changes in Apple’s core iOS apps, there are miscellaneous improvements to other system apps worth mentioning.

Find My

With iOS 13, Apple has unified the Find My iPhone and Find My Friends apps into a single app called Find My. While the design is all-new, basic features are essentially unchanged: you can still mark missing devices as lost, locate them, play sounds on them, and wipe them remotely; for friends, you can track them on a map to see where they are, set up notifications for their location status (in iOS 13, they’ll be notified when you enable notifications for them), and customize their location with labels such as ‘Home’ or ‘Work’.

The Devices section of Find My.

The Friends section of Find My.

It makes sense to offer both friend and device location tracking in the same app; even though I barely use these features, I’m a fan of the modernized design.

New notification options for friends in iOS 13.

There’s a fascinating change to the underlying location-tracking system for lost devices: in iOS 13, Apple has implemented crowdsourced location reporting so that even if a device isn’t connected to Wi-Fi or the cellular network, you’ll be able to receive updates on its location. This is possible because other iOS 13 devices near one that’s been marked as missing can detect its Bluetooth signal, sort of like a distress beacon, and report its location back to you. Information is entirely anonymized and encrypted end-to-end, which means that people with a device that “found” the missing one will never know what happened or whose device it was.

Even though I hope I’ll never have to rely on it, this is a genius feature: once deployed at scale now that iOS 13 has launched to the general public, it has the potential of solving the issue of stolen devices being put in offline mode so they can’t communicate their location to you.

Find My’s crowdsourced location sharing seems to be working as advertised: a friend of mine lost his iPad at the Fiumicino airport in Rome a few months ago, and the device was offline; thanks to people running the iOS 13 beta, the location was updated overnight and he was able to retrieve his device the following day. This feature is a prime example of the integration between hardware and software unique to the Apple ecosystem, and I bet we’re going to hear dozens of similar stories over the next few months.

Camera

Besides new functionalities exclusive to the iPhone 11 hardware, the Camera app in iOS 13 has gained two new features for owners of existing iPhone models: there’s a new intensity slider to regulate the strength of Portrait Lighting, and a new effect called High-Key Light Mono.

The intensity slider is available along the top edge of the Camera app when shooting in Portrait Lighting mode, which essentially means all effects except Natural Light. The slider lets you tweak the intensity of light hitting the subject: the stronger you set it, the more skin and other facial features will be smoothed out in the final shot.

While I don’t take pictures in Portrait mode often, I’m glad Apple added a manual intensity adjustment tool because I don’t like aggressive smoothing that is often the default result of pictures taken on an iPhone XS. My Studio Light shots taken on iOS 13 have a bit more detail than what the default configuration would offer, and I’m pretty satisfied with the results.

The new Portrait Lighting intensity slider (left and center) and the new Portrait effect in iOS 13, High-Key Light Mono.

As for High-Key Light Mono: it’s a new effect that renders the subject in monochrome while turning the entire background white. In the right hands, I’m sure it can produce some gorgeous results. In my tests, I always noticed some image artifacts with separation between background and subject; I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that this feature performs much better on iPhone hardware introduced earlier this month.

This doesn’t necessarily apply to the system Camera app, but Apple has improved the Portrait Segmentation API in iOS 13 with support for separate skin, hair, and teeth segmentation mattes. Building on top of the API launched last year, these new mattes are embedded in all Portrait mode captures by default, and they will allow apps to isolate aspects of a subject such as eyebrows, mouth, or hair. Demos that Apple showed off at WWDC were, frankly, terrifying, but I’m expecting developers of makeup apps and apps with special face effects to take advantage of this API soon.

Calendar

The only addition to the Calendar app this year is the ability to add attachments to events. Unlike Reminders, which only supports scanned documents and images, Calendar uses a Files picker to let you attach any file you want to an event. I’d like Reminders to copy this approach.

Adding an attachment to an event in iPadOS 13.

Clock

The Clock app was updated with large titles, a true black background instead of dark gray, and a new circular UI for timers.

The new timer UI in iOS 13.

Health and Activity

Both Health and Activity have received substantial upgrades in iOS 13: Health has been redesigned to provide new highlights and a cleaner look for various stats; Activity now offers a helpful trend functionality to see how active you’ve been over time and focus on specific areas of your daily routine.

The updated Health and Activity apps in iOS 13.

We’ve covered both apps in-depth with dedicated overviews earlier this year, which you can read here and here. Club MacStories members can also read updated versions of both stories in an exclusive eBook that collects additional iOS 13 coverage from the MacStories team; you can find more details here.

Maps

As part of Apple’s long-term plan to build its own map of the world based on extensive collection of 3D imagery, the Maps app in iOS 13 features a host of notable enhancements that, after years of playing catch-up, finally make it a worthy competitor to Google Maps. You can now create collections of your favorite places and share them with other users; the interface to browse nearby points of interest has been refreshed; in selected cities in the United States, Apple is debuting Look Around, an impressive – and immersive – 3D navigation tool that I found faster and more polished than Google’s Street View in my tests.

I live in Italy, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to take advantage of features such as updated maps and Look Around, which are exclusive to North America for now. Our Ryan Christoffel, however, published an in-depth analysis of all the changes in the Maps app for iOS 13, which I highly recommend reading here.

Books

Following last year’s relaunch, Apple only added one new feature to the Books app in iOS 13: reading goals. Available at the bottom of the Reading Now page, reading goals are Apple’s attempt at nurturing the habit of reading by encouraging you to spend at least five minutes reading every day.

Reading goals in iOS 13.

When you reach five minutes of reading in the Books app, you’ll receive Apple’s compliments via a notification and add one day to your streak. The 5-minute goal can be customized and you can view your current streak underneath a counter that tells you how long you’ve been reading today.

In iOS 13.1, you’ll find a new option under Settings ⇾ Books to include PDFs in your reading goals.

This habit-tracking aspect of Books wouldn’t be complete without a way to brag with your friends about your reading habits so, of course, you can share your current streak as an image with others. I don’t think I’ve ever found myself in a social situation where “book reading bragging rights” are commonplace, but I suppose the most competitive book clubs could use this feature.

Sharing your reading goals in iOS 13.

I don’t particularly care about sharing my reading streak, but I like the idea of Apple pushing us to read more and spend time away from Twitter and Facebook – we could all use that nowadays.

In addition to daily reading goals, Apple added an annual goals functionality too. As you can imagine, it automatically collects all the books you’ve read in the current year and comes with its own customizable goal. You can scroll through multiple years to see books you read in the past38, and you can tap on the grid of completed books to share it as an image.

As you can see from the screenshots above, I discovered the Red Rising series this year, and I wholeheartedly recommend it if you’re into space, Roman mythology, and political intrigue. Hail Reaper.

Everything Else

As is always the case with a new version of iOS, there are dozens of other features and smaller details to be discovered in the nooks and crannies of the OS. And this year, we have two operating systems to analyze.

Location Permissions

Announced by Craig Federighi at WWDC, iOS 13 introduces three important changes to how location access is granted to apps and how location tracking is reported to users by the OS.

First, users can now choose to grant an app access to their location just once. Designed to allow users to evaluate a location-based app without committing to having their location permanently tracked, the ‘Allow Once’ button is now part of the default location permission prompt – it is enforced by the system and doesn’t require explicit adoption by apps. For developers, the ‘Allow Once’ option will provide an app with provisional access to the user’s location when the app is being used, but the permission will be automatically revoked after a period of inactivity.

The new ‘Allow Once’ option in iOS 13.

The second change has more dramatic consequences for apps that use background location monitoring: iOS 13 no longer includes an ‘Always’ option for location tracking when a location permission prompt first comes up. Even if a third-party app is configured to request ‘Always’ access to location, iOS 13 will only present ‘Allow While Using App’ and ‘Allow Once’ as options. For an app to be granted proper ‘Always’ location access even while not in use, there are two possible scenarios:

The user needs to go into an app’s ‘Location’ detail screen in Settings and manually promote it to ‘Always’;

When appropriate after the app has been used for a while, iOS will ask users if they want to upgrade an app’s location access to ‘Always’.

Lastly, iOS 13 includes a reporting tool for apps with background location tracking turned on that will helpfully show you all the times an app has used your location. This new prompt includes a map visualization of where your location was requested, and it includes buttons to keep allowing background location monitoring or change an app’s permissions to only when in use.

As you can imagine, some companies are…not happy that Apple’s doing all of this in iOS 13. They cite anti-competitive practices and have written open letters demanding the return of iOS 12’s ‘Always Allow’ functionality. As a user, I hope Apple will not cave to their requests: I appreciate that Apple has sought to protect consumer choice and privacy by overriding apps’ requests for background location monitoring with a permission flow that prioritizes user intent instead. I use various apps that are supposed to function with ‘Always’ location tracking, and I didn’t encounter the issues mentioned by those companies: iOS 13 prompted me to upgrade location access when necessary, and I could always choose to go into Settings and modify the option myself.

In many ways, Apple is undoing a lot of the features they shipped years ago to enable persistent background location tracking. But we live in times that call for stronger privacy regulations and customer-focused measures; tech companies should take no chances with data as sensitive as their users’ locations. The more Apple can do to cull intrusive requests for persistent location monitoring, the better it is for customers. I’ve had no issues with iOS 13’s location permission flow, and I hope Apple won’t be forced to revert it.

Text Selection, Gestures, and Keyboard

Both iOS and iPadOS 13 bring major changes to how text is selected, introduce new gestures for power users, and see the debut of a long-awaited keyboard option.

The new operating systems remove one of iOS’ marquee and historical features – the magnification loupe39 – in the name of a revised text selection mechanism that lets you directly pick up the cursor and select text with gestures. While it is still possible to press on the keyboard with 3D Touch (or hold the space bar) to move the cursor, you can now simply pick up the blinking cursor and move it onscreen to drop it in a new position. When picked up, the cursor will enlarge slightly; in iOS 13.1, it’ll also subtly snap to the beginning and end of lines.

You can pick up the cursor and drag it around.

When you’re moving the cursor this way, iOS 13 will not show you a magnification loupe. The removal of that useful visual detail could be ascribed to the new text selection behavior in iOS 13: now, instead of double-tapping to enter text selection, you can tap, hold, and swipe to start highlighting text.

The new selection mechanism in iOS and iPadOS 13.

I like this new text selection gesture (even though it took me a while to get used to it), but I don’t buy the theory that removing the magnification loupe was necessary to avoid conflicts between old and new gestures. iOS could and should still display a magnification loupe when performing text selections: in the months I’ve been using iOS 13, I’ve found myself unable to tell with precision whether I was selecting the right portion of text because my finger was covering it and there was no magnification loupe on the side to double-check the text I was selecting. Apple fixed this problem years ago; the magnification loupe should come back because, even if the new text selection gesture is faster and more convenient, seeing the text you’re selecting is now harder than before, and it’s not visually accessible.

Thankfully, Apple pretty much nailed all the other gestures related to text selection in iOS 13. As before, you can double-tap text to start text selection (an alternative to the tap, hold, and swipe behavior); now, you can also triple-tap to select a sentence and quadruple-tap to select an entire paragraph of text. These gestures are supported both on iPhone and iPad; once you know they exist, it’s hard to go back to selecting blocks of text without them.

Triple and quadruple taps for text selections.

iOS 13 even supports an intelligent text selection mode, wherein a double-tap will automatically select entire addresses, phone numbers, names, URLs, and other text elements that are usually parsed by smart data detectors:

Intelligent text selection in iOS and iPadOS 13.

And in the realm of hidden gestures that speed up common interactions, both iOS and iPadOS 13 have plenty to offer – Apple is now seemingly okay with the reality of certain features being discoverable to certain users only.

First, let’s pour one out for the shake-to-undo gesture, still supported in iOS 13, but clearly replaced by a new three-finger double-tap gesture as the better option for everyone:

Double-tap with three fingers to quickly undo.

Since users may need to undo actions in non-text editing environments, shake-to-undo isn’t entirely gone but, in the majority of cases, the new three-finger double-tap is the winner. The system even suggests it if you try to shake-to-undo:

This gesture is merely the tip of the iceberg. If you perform a three-finger swipe to the left or right, you’ll be able to quickly undo or redo, respectively:

Swipe with three fingers to undo and redo.

When you undo or redo, you’ll notice a pill-shaped message pop up at the top of the screen. This UI element is part of the bigger menu for copy and paste that now appears on both iPhone and iPad when performing a three-finger tap anywhere on screen:

Place three fingers onscreen for this new interface element to appear.

There is still a traditional copy and paste menu in iOS 13 that appears atop selected text; the new one, however, supports multitouch gestures in that it visually confirms the action you’re performing while it is shown. For instance, if you show the menu then three-finger swipe left or right, you’ll notice undo and redo being highlighted in the menu:

Undo and redo are shown in the new copy and paste overlay too.

The copy, cut, and paste actions have their own gestures too: both on iPhone and iPad, you can perform a three-finger pinch to quickly copy, a three-finger spread to paste, a double three-finger pinch to cut. Given their multitouch nature, these gestures are more comfortable to perform on a large iPad, but they’re supported on iPhone as well.

New gestures for copy and paste.

We’re not done yet. There’s a new selection method for multiple items in table and collection views: hold down two fingers and swipe to select multiple items at once.

Swipe with two fingers to select items in table or collection views more quickly.

The new selection gesture makes it a lot easier to select multiple items in one continuous motion, and it’s supported in apps such as Mail, Notes, and Shortcuts. In iOS 13, you’ll have to tap an ‘Edit’ button in apps to enter selection mode; in iOS 13.1, you’ll be able to place two fingers onscreen and swipe-to-select without manually activating a selection mode first.

There’s also a new way to scroll long documents: you can pick up the scroll bar and scrub to move it more quickly, or flick it up and down to go faster:

Scroll bar scrubbing.

As I discussed with Craig Federighi on AppStories, there’s always a tension between shipping an iOS update to millions of customers and designing advanced features that only a fraction of them will discover. Apple appears to be more comfortable with this idea now: they have accepted that it’s okay to add options that perhaps only power users will appreciate, relying on progressive disclosure to help surface these features throughout the OS. Even though I’m not 100% sold on the new text selection mechanism in iOS 13, the gestures have grown on me, and I find myself using them frequently – even on my iPhone.

As for the system keyboard: on iPhone, and when the iPad’s keyboard is in floating mode, you can now slide to type. This is not a separate mode: slide to type (officially called ‘QuickPath’) is built into Apple’s main QuickType keyboard and supports switching between modes as you’re typing. You can tap on letters as usual, then slide to type, go back to tapping, and so forth.

Slide typing with the iPad’s keyboard in floating mode.

There’s nothing inherently spectacular about slide to type: other companies have offered swipe keyboards for years, and Apple’s simply matching its competitors here. The best part about slide to type is that it’s integrated with the regular keyboard, so I no longer have to switch to Gboard when I don’t feel like typing the traditional way. In my tests, slide to type has been reliable: its word prediction algorithm seems solid and comparable to other swipe keyboards, and I like that I can hit the delete key to delete the last word I entered by sliding.40 This new mode is a perfect fit for one-handed interactions, and I use it often.

Control Center

There are no revolutionary changes to Control Center in iOS 13, but I appreciate the few tweaks Apple brought this year.

You no longer need to open Settings to connect to Wi-Fi networks or Bluetooth devices: open Control Center, expand the wireless radio platter in the top left, then press the Wi-Fi or Bluetooth icons to open a secondary panel where you can choose networks and devices. This is a great little enhancement to iOS, requiring fewer visits to Settings.

There are two useful additions to volume control in iOS 13: the icon for the device you’re currently controlling is shown atop the expanded volume slider, providing greater clarity over which volume level is being altered; and, you can now toggle active noise cancellation for Beats headphones that support it using a dedicated button in Control Center.

Different device icons for the volume slider in Control Center.

You can toggle noise cancellation for Beats headphones in iOS 13. The icon is different between iOS 13 and iOS 13.1. (iOS 13.1 version pictured above.)

Furthermore, iOS 13’s Control Center introduces a new QR code scanner, which doesn’t take you into the system’s Camera app anymore, but is instead a dedicated viewfinder with a built-in flashlight toggle. It also comes with a fantastic animation for scanned QR codes.

Lastly – and this is an odd one given that Apple advertised the feature as coming “later this fall” – you can now pair two sets of AirPods with your iPhone by sharing your audio with a friend directly from Control Center. Here’s how it works: in Control Center for iOS 13, you can tap a ‘Share Audio’ button that makes your iPhone available as an “audio source” for other headphones to connect to and jump onto the audio stream controlled by your device. The other person will simply need to bring their iPhone or compatible headphones next to your iPhone, accept a request, and they’ll be able to enjoy a song or movie along with you.

AirPods audio sharing between an iPhone XS Max and iPhone XS with a mix of first- and second-generation AirPods.

In my tests with two iPhone XS units and both first- and second-generation AirPods, audio sharing worked flawlessly: I was able to share music I was listening to with my girlfriend’s AirPods in seconds just by bringing her iPhone next to mine; she reported no latency in the shared audio stream, and management from Control Center on my end was intuitive – additional AirPods just showed up as other output devices. Audio sharing, however, also seemed unfinished: the connection screen depicted Beats headphones and other Bluetooth headphones as being compatible with audio sharing, but I was only able to get it to work with AirPods.

Examples of headphones theoretically supporting audio sharing.

Despite the confusion surrounding the availability of audio sharing and supported devices, I’m impressed with the performance and practical design of this feature, which has been cleverly integrated with Control Center. I have a feeling this is going to be a terrific addition for couples who plan on listening to music or watching Netflix together, each with their own set of AirPods.

Settings

Unsurprisingly, iOS 13 is packed with new features and hidden options to be discovered in the Settings app. Here’s a list of the most important ones I’ve collected over the past three months.

Silence Unknown Callers. Available under Settings ⇾ Phone, this is a nuclear option to deal with unknown callers: their calls will be silenced, sent to voicemail, and displayed in the Recents list of the Phone app. According to Apple, incoming calls will continue to ring for people in your contacts, recent outgoing calls, and Siri suggestions, which should prevent the potential downside of missing a call from someone not in your contacts whom you still want to talk to. As others have noted, this is a blunt instrument that won’t work for everyone, but since I enabled it, I was able to put an end to spam calls, which are always being silenced by the system now. Double-checking the Phone app for false positives in the Recents tab is a small price to pay to end robocalls.

Allow App Store downloads over 200 MB. Finally: under Settings ⇾ App Store ⇾ App Downloads, you’ll find a new option to allow app downloads over 200 MB. You can choose to always allow large downloads or to be asked to confirm them every time; when you’re roaming, you’ll always be asked to allow a download regardless of your preference.

Multilingual features. Good news for those who speak multiple languages: iOS 13 lets you set a specific language per-app, different from the system’s default. I like to use my devices in U.S. English, but some apps, such as navigation tools or restaurant booking apps, are best used in my native language; with iOS 13, I can keep my iPhone set to U.S. English but use Google Maps and The Fork in Italian. Developers don’t need to do anything to support this option, which is enabled by the system for free.

New options for multilingual users in iOS 13.

Additionally, if you’ve activated multiple languages for the QuickType keyboard, you can now switch between them while using dictation with the press of a button. While you’re dictating text, change language from the keyboard switcher, and iOS 13 will continue to listen and enter text in a different language without stopping dictation. This isn’t as impressive as a real understanding of multiple languages at once, but it’s a start.

Low Data Mode. This option, available in Settings ⇾ Cellular ⇾ Cellular Data Options, joins Low Power Mode in helping you conserve battery life and cellular data by telling apps to reduce their network requests. By default, Low Data Mode defers certain system tasks and pauses Background App Refresh; if third-party developers want to properly support it, they can “annotate” their apps’ network requests to let the system decide which ones to disable when Low Data Mode is turned on. You can also enable Low Data Mode for Wi-Fi networks or Personal Hotspot in those connections’ detail screens.

Yoink has added support for Low Data Mode in iOS 13. When Low Data Mode is turned on, Yoink will use low-resolution images for link previews (the blurry MacStories logo), and it’ll ask you to confirm every time you want to download a file.

Personal Hotspot. Speaking of hotspots, there’s a new integration with Family Sharing to control access to your Personal Hotspot for individual family members: you can allow them to join automatically or choose to always ask for approval. There’s also an explicit setting to allow other people to join your Personal Hotspot or not.

Easier access to App Store subscriptions. In the ‘Apple ID’ section of Settings (which you can access by tapping your profile picture), you’ll see a top-level ‘Subscriptions’ button to instantly view all your active app subscriptions.

Optimized Battery Charging. Available in Settings ⇾ Battery ⇾ Battery Health, this option has been created, according to Apple, to reduce battery aging. With optimized charging, the iPhone learns from your charging routine so it can wait to finish charging past 80% until you need it.

Use Xbox One S and PlayStation 4 controllers to play games. This announcement got the loudest cheer at WWDC: you can now use the DualShock 4 and Xbox One S Bluetooth controllers with iOS and iPadOS by connecting them in Settings. Games will see those controllers as standard MFi ones. I love the fact that I can now play games on my iPad Pro with a DualShock 4; for more details on how console controllers work with iOS and iPadOS 13, check out our in-depth story here.

Fonts. This is my favorite enhancement of all: you can now preview fonts you’ve installed on your device (using utilities such as AnyFont or FondFont) in Settings ⇾ General ⇾ Fonts. Each font displays all the typefaces currently installed, and you can preview each one with standard Lorem Ipsum text and full character sets.

This is already a fantastic change compared to iOS 12, but there’s much more. For the first time, you’ll be able to buy fonts from the App Store: both design boutiques and major developers such as Adobe, Monotype, and Morisawa have committed to bringing fonts to the App Store. For years now, I’ve been buying fonts directly from their creators’ websites, using AnyFont to install them as custom certificates – a workaround that often led to errors and confusion regarding management of font files. The possibility of shedding that complexity in favor of classic App Store downloads is enticing; I haven’t been able to test this feature yet, but I’m excited to check it out. Apple refers to apps that make fonts available on the App Store as “font provider apps”, and they can initiate font installation by bringing up a simple dialog; when those apps are deleted, their fonts are removed too.

In terms of developer technologies: apps will be able to support custom fonts by adopting the system-wide font picker like before; in iOS 13, the font picker has been redesigned with support for search and filters for different typefaces within the same family (I haven’t been able to test this functionality either).

And More…

Finally, here’s a grab bag of everything else worth noting about iOS 13.

Podcast transcripts. Launching as beta in iOS 13.1, you’ll be able to search for something you heard on a podcast by typing a search query in Apple’s Podcasts app. Apple has announced they’ll be automatically indexing the most popular shows on Apple Podcasts and transcribing spoken content for search purposes, but it’s unclear how frequently these transcripts will be updated and how many podcasts will be included after the initial rollout.

Episode transcripts are labeled as such in search results.

In my initial tests, I was able to find keywords for specific topics (such as “Nintendo” or “PlayStation”) that were discussed in somewhat recent episodes of popular shows. It’ll be interesting to see how this functionality evolves over time, and if Apple will ever consider displaying full transcripts in the Podcasts app’s Now Playing screen.

Core Haptics. A new API for third-party developers, with Core Haptics developers will be able to design custom haptic patterns with greater control than in iOS 12. For instance, developers can now fine-tune the intensity or sharpness of haptics, creating tactile feedback with low amplitude or strength that communicates different interactions to users. I’ve tested Core Haptics in CalcAllot for iOS 13, and I believe they’re another way developers can make their apps feel unique, more accessible, and fun.

Personalized suggestions in the App Store. Starting with iOS 13.1, the App Store’s Search tab will gain a new section collecting personalized app and game suggestions. According to Apple, both your interactions with the App Store (subscriptions, pre-orders, etc.) as well as additional information (App Store browsing history, searches, app updates, etc.) will be used to improve personalized recommendations, which feed the suggestions displayed in the Search page. In my tests, I haven’t seen any suggested app that particularly grabbed my attention, but I’m keen to see how this system will evolve and if Apple will integrate it with Apple Arcade.

I don’t think I’m the target audience for My Tamagotchi Forever.

Delete apps from the App Store’s Updates screen. Let’s wrap this up with a long-awaited quality of life improvement: in the iOS 13 App Store, you can delete apps from the Updates screen, which has been relocated to the Account section of the App Store app.

It’s a small detail, but if you’re the type of person who installs too many apps on their devices, it’ll come in handy.

Conclusion

When an iOS beta season wraps up and it’s time for millions of users to hit ‘Install’ on their iPhones and iPads, I always try to reflect on the overarching theme behind Apple’s latest software effort. To identify a single, all-encompassing idea – such as “iPad multitasking” in 2017 or “stability” in iOS 12 – that can put a nice bow on a new version of iOS and prepare us for future updates.

For the first time in years, I can’t pick a leitmotif that would adequately describe the magnitude of iOS and iPadOS 13. And maybe I don’t have to.

Most people will probably remember iOS 13 as another stepping stone in the evolution of Apple’s software design – the operating system that introduced dark mode and welcomed context menus in lieu of 3D Touch. Some will cherish the memory of Apple caving to critics and opening its file manager to external USB storage. Starting today, millions of iPhone users will find a new Shortcuts app on their Home screens and be exposed, likely for the first time in their lives, to the idea of automation and making a computer work for them. In a break with previous patterns, there is indeed something for everyone in iOS 13.

There’s an aura of intrigue about iOS 13’s atypical nature, which you can appreciate when analyzing iOS releases as more than mere software updates. They’re massive projects delivered at an unprecedented scale at once – millions of lines of code written by thousands of engineers, which are, somehow, delivered on time for an entire family of devices. Apple often misses a few marks, and iOS 13’s not perfect either: some of iOS 13’s best features won’t be available until iOS 13.1 (or later), and the system’s stability has somewhat suffered because of the sheer amount of new functionalities and tweaks. But in the meta discussion surrounding Apple’s software, controversies and unexpected features are also what make iOS 13 interesting and, from a reviewer’s perspective, more memorable than “safe” releases such as iOS 10 or iOS 12. I’m not justifying iOS 13’s shortcomings; I’m saying that even with its foibles, I can’t deny iOS 13’s got style.

Amidst a deluge of new features and design updates, iOS 13, more than its predecessors, makes clear that Apple doesn’t consider iOS just an operating system anymore: it’s the platform upon which the company can build other experiences. In a way, the modern iOS is to Apple devices what Mac OS X was to the original iPhone: a stable technological foundation, ready to be taken in new directions.

The modern iOS is to Apple devices what Mac OS X was to the original iPhone: a stable technological foundation.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the bifurcation of the platform with iPadOS. In older versions of iOS, there was always a palpable tension between the iPhone and iPad – a struggle to reconcile whether it was an “iPhone year” or “iPad year” for Apple’s software. That tension has been resolved by Apple in 2019 with the most obvious response: it’s the year of both.

With iOS and iPadOS officially separate, but united at the core, Apple was able to take what worked in the past and expand it for a device that doesn’t incur the same limitations as an iPhone. Desktop-class Safari and new Files integrations put the iPad on the same playing field as other tablets that can transform into laptops; multiwindowing, despite a few missteps, sticks the landing, blending the advantages of working on a Mac with the ingenuity of iOS. In all of this, Apple has found a satisfying balance between iOS and iPadOS, with key features shared between platforms (dark mode, Shortcuts, and Reminders, just to name a few) and plenty of attention specifically devoted to each. I don’t know if Apple will be able to keep their iPad momentum going on a regular schedule over the next few years; but today, I hope they can, and I want to believe they will.

By introducing iPadOS, Apple is selling us a bold future, one where the iPad can learn from the Mac’s lessons and play co-protagonist alongside the iPhone. And taken at face value, iPadOS delivers on what Apple promised back in June: more than any other iOS update before, iPadOS 13 has freed me from the constraints of desktop computing, turning my iPad experience into something that is neither iOS nor macOS, but different, audacious, and empowering.

As the curtain closes on the iPad’s first decade, whatever the future may hold, Apple has decided it’s time for the tablet to grow up, and is letting the iPad embark on its own adventure. Inspired by the Mac, firmly grounded in iOS’ tradition, and unafraid of what’s next.

Credits

This review wouldn’t have been possible without the help, feedback, and existence of the following people, animals, beverages, and apps:

My girlfriend Silvia, for her patience, love, design skills, photos and videos, and wisdom

Brian King, for bringing this review to life with his amazing animations and 3D graphics

Ryan Christoffel, for his superb editing skills and incredible patience

John Voorhees, a friend and amazing colleague

Alex Guyot, for his work at MacStories and help this summer

Zelda and Ginger, for keeping me company while I was writing the review

Brett Terpstra

Alessandro Vendruscolo, who made the web layout happen (again)

Simon Støvring, for helping me with JavaScript and saving me dozens of hours with Scriptable

Finn Voorhees, who wrote my custom image upload scripts

James Thomson

Myke Hurley

Stephen Hackett

iA Writer, Drafts, Working Copy, Timery, Shortcuts, and MindNode – essential apps that helped me create this story

Every app developer who sent me betas during the summer

Every engineer at Apple who always makes reviewing iOS (and now iPadOS!) each summer fun
– The Workflow team, for still staying hungry and foolish

@TiccisEspresso – more than ever, I couldn’t have done this without your daily assistance

Every Club MacStories member

And finally, every MacStories reader, for allowing me to keep doing what I love. Thank you.

Plus, we all know a legion of YouTubers, each armed with 20 different iPhone units, is already preparing hundreds of speed test videos. Their videos are going to be more effective than this section if all you care about is seeing performance improvements in action. ↩

I assume an update to the iWork apps for iOS will be required to bring this new share sheet functionality. ↩

Codecs! In an iOS app! ↩

In iOS 13, developers can also tap into an improved Quick Look Thumbnailing framework that supports asynchronous thumbnail preview generation for custom document types. ↩

I should note how, bafflingly, the Files app still doesn't let you rename file extensions in 2019. ↩

You'll have to check whether you're dealing with a bus-powered drive that can accept power from the host iOS device or an external accessory that requires a separate power source. On iPhone, you'll have to ensure a drive is externally powered, otherwise you'll get an error message. ↩

I've dug into this by creating bookmarks in Scriptable that were pointing to documents located on an external drive. After resolving the bookmark's path, I saw that the system was using a 'LiveFiles' framework to access items stored under com.apple.filesystems.userfsd, suggesting that external drives are indeed managed inside the user space in the OS. ↩

Imagine if developers had to manually support each individual disk format. ↩

Apple never explicitly uses the term "user agent" in iPadOS. ↩

Does Apple think this level of information is too much for iOS users to bear? ↩

Because All Photos has been rolled into the main tab, the first item in the Albums page has been renamed Recents, and it's still a plain grid of all your photos from oldest to newest. ↩

Like in iOS 12, Photos can automatically categorize photos taken at concerts and other public events based on a database Apple has never disclosed. In my tests, it always worked reliably with concerts from popular artists. ↩

It would be nice, for example, to assign reminders to specific lists with natural language. It would also be neat if Reminders could automatically extract URLs pasted into the title field and convert them to the new 'URL' parameter supported in iOS 13. ↩

Shortcuts may change during the week. ↩

I wonder, however, if third-party messaging apps could be supported in addition to Messages in the future. After all, third-party messaging apps can already integrate with Intents and SiriKit; the same technology could be used to trigger a reminder when you're texting a contact in, say, WhatsApp instead of Messages. ↩

Unfortunately, it appears that the 'URL' field is not exposed to third-party developers via EventKit, so third-party clients will have to continue embedding URLs in the 'Notes' field. ↩

Neither images nor subtasks are available for CalDAV or Exchange accounts; they're only supported in iCloud. ↩

Many of the original team members still work at Apple today. ↩

In iOS 13, you no longer need to assign a Siri phrase to your custom shortcuts. This is nice in that all of your shortcuts are now enabled for Siri by default, but there's an unfortunate downside: it's no longer possible to use a different name and Siri phrase for the same shortcut. Whatever you set as the shortcut's name will be its Siri activation phrase. While I appreciate having shortcuts enabled for Siri by default, I'd like to have the ability to give them personalized phrases back. ↩

Even though Apple isn't calling it as such. ↩

Previously, visual actions for third-party apps in Shortcuts required Apple to manually build integrations with specific apps via URL schemes. ↩

This last example is debatable: if my location changes, it is an action I have physically performed, after all – but I get where Apple's coming from. ↩

My girlfriend hasn't noticed them yet. Please don't tell her. ↩

However, the number of app icons will be the same as the standard Home screen layout. Even if you disable widgets, you can't make the Home screen any denser. ↩

This one's debatable. I'd like to turn the inspector of complex reminders with multiple attachments or subtasks into its own window. ↩

Surprisingly, iPadOS even knows when a URL belongs to another app, in which case dropping it will create a new window for that app based on the URL scheme you dragged. ↩

When restoring multiple windows at once, they'll re-appear in Exposé but iPadOS will not immediately open any of them. ↩

Look, I'm really trying to imagine a valid use case here. ↩

If you want to have some silly fun for a few seconds, try expanding the panel by swiping up on it. Squishy! ↩

You can tap 'All Photos' to navigate between albums. ↩

It's similar to the photo picker seen in Apple's Photos extension for Messages. ↩

There's a large subject here as well. ↩

Not to be confused with the existing Attachments view, which can now be accessed from gallery view by tapping the ellipsis button at the top. ↩

iOS 13's hottest API is Vision. It has everything: image classification; OCR for text recognition; heat maps for images to identify parts that are likely to draw attention; the ability to find "important" areas of an image; animal recognition; a way to find humans in photos. Like NSUserActivity before it, Vision is the gift that keeps on giving. ↩

The emoji keyboard can be accessed from an emoji button on the left side of the space bar, which is always separate from the globe button to switch between keyboard layouts. This is one of my favorite small changes in iOS 13. ↩

Memoji are hidden by default and you need to swipe to see them. ↩

With a beautiful animation that matches the corner radii of the Super Retina Display. ↩

Apparently the Books app always had this data in its database, even when it wasn't exposed with reading goals. ↩

The UI element that showed you a zoomed-in version of the text you were likely covering with your finger while performing a text selection. ↩

You can disable this option in Settings ⇾ General ⇾ Keyboard. ↩